by Dean Koontz
“I believe that she guessed … and was right.”
“Then she must be a witch, for sure.”
Just then I realized why Mr. Yoshioka looked more relaxed than usual. Although he wore a suit and tie, as always, for the first time he wasn’t also wearing a vest. He’d made a concession to the holiday.
Only that morning, I’d been terrified when I realized that Eve Adams had worked her way into our locked apartment during the night and had photographed me in my sleep; but now I was excited to have an outrage to share with Mr. Yoshioka, an outrage that seemed to one-up a picture of some little town in California.
I said, “She left another Polaroid here. Come on. I’ll show you.”
I led him along the hallway to my bedroom. He stood swaying from side to side on the threshold, looking uncomfortable, and wouldn’t enter. I got the candy tin and brought it to him.
He smiled at the painting of the woman on the lid, tapped it with one finger, and said, “La Belle Ferroniere.”
In truth, at the time, I didn’t quite know what he said, except that it sounded French, which seemed strange coming from someone who was so obviously not French. Anyway, I was eager to show him the picture of me sleeping.
“Did not the flashbulb wake you?” he asked.
“Nothing much can wake me when I really want to sleep.”
Frowning, he stopped swaying back and forth on the threshold and shook his head instead. “This is not good. This is very bad. What does your mother say?”
“I haven’t shown it to her yet. I wanted to think about it first. I didn’t want to worry her.”
I took the fabric eye from the box and explained its history, but he couldn’t quite understand.
“This is an eye from your stuffed toy?”
“Not from my toy. I don’t know whose toy. A wind blew it along the alleyway, blew it but nothing else, until it just stopped at me. I thought it had some juju, you know, so I saved it.”
“What is juju?”
“Kind of like voodoo.” When I saw the word meant nothing to him, I said, “You know, like in the movies.”
“I do not attend the movies.”
“Well, there was a voodoo-in-the-city thing on TV not long ago.”
“I do not watch television. I have often been told that I should purchase one, but I do not believe I ever will.”
“No TV? Gosh, what do you do, then?”
“I work.”
“I mean when you’re not working.”
“I read. I think.”
“I read, too. And my mom. We like books.”
After puzzling over the fabric eye one more time, he gave it back to me, and I carefully stored it upside down in the La Florentine container.
As I returned the tin box to the nightstand, Mr. Yoshioka said, “There can be only two logical explanations. Either Miss Eve Adams is a most expert lock-picker or she possesses keys to our apartments.”
Mr. Yoshioka was the essence of cool, but his kind of cool was unique to him. His precise way of speaking, without contractions or slang, never dropping the g at the end of a word, had appealed to my ear for music from the start of our relationship. Now, as we were engaged in deduction, trying to solve a mystery, though he had no accent, he reminded me just a little bit of that intellectual, supersmart detective Charlie Chan, in those old movies. In 1966, Charlie Chan films were still run on TV. Nobody yet found them racially offensive and worthy of censorship, maybe because Mr. Chan was always the smartest person in every scene. Charlie Chan, of course, was Chinese American, and Mr. Yoshioka was Japanese American. I could tell the difference, though I was just nine, because I had seen Mr. Moto on TV, in a series of funky old films about an intellectual, supersmart Japanese American detective based on a series of short stories and novel-length mysteries by John P. Marquand, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a mainstream novel titled The Late George Apley. To tell the truth, Fiona Cassidy, aka Eve Adams, scared me, but there were moments when the fun of playing sidekick to Mr. Yoshioka outweighed my fear of that mystery woman, probably because there never had been a series of movies featuring an intellectual, supersmart Negro detective, which was how I was beginning to see myself.
Closing the nightstand drawer and returning to the doorway in which my visitor stood, I said, “She must be a master lock-picker. Because where would she get keys?”
“Perhaps the building superintendent gave them to her.”
“Mr. Smaller? He wouldn’t do that. He could lose his job for doing something like that.”
“I am told that men do reckless things for pretty women. In fact, I have seen it.”
I shook my head. “Mr. Smaller says women break your heart so often you can’t count how many times. He says don’t let them start. Besides, he doesn’t like his bosses downtown, and they sent her here to do the work in Six-C. He says they’re all black-hearted company men, they get big pay for just picking their noses. Anyway, since they sent her from downtown, he probably thinks she’s a Bilderberger.”
Mr. Yoshioka’s mouth moved as if he were working the word around his tongue, trying to taste some meaning in it. “What is a … what you just said?”
“It’s a long story,” I replied. “Not important. Mr. Smaller wouldn’t have given her the keys, and black-hearted company men probably wouldn’t, either. So she must be a fantastic lock-picker. What did you bring in the shopping bag?”
“A device to guarantee your safety in the night.”
“What—a shotgun?”
He smiled, but it was a thin and nervous smile. “Let us hope that it does not come to that.”
31
From the small shopping bag, Mr. Yoshioka withdrew a manual drill with a crank handle, a tape measure, a pencil, a hammer, a nail, and a two-piece security-chain lock with screws.
“I have already installed one on my door. Of course this cannot keep Miss Eve Adams out when no one is at home to engage the chain. But it will assure us that she cannot intrude at night when you are sleeping.”
He held the jamb plate to the door frame and with the pencil marked the holes where the four screws would go.
“Hey, wait a second. How am I going to explain this to my mom?”
“What is there to explain? Miss Eve Adams is a dangerous and unpredictable person. She—”
“I haven’t told my mom about Eve Adams or the knife threat or the Polaroid of me sleeping, none of it.”
He blinked at me, as though I had suddenly blurred and he were trying to bring me back into focus. “Why have you not told her about such an important thing?”
“It’s complicated.”
He regarded me with a look that reminded me of someone else, and for a moment I couldn’t think who, but then I realized this was the look with which Sister Agnes regarded me on those rare days when I showed up at Saint Scholastica without my homework complete.
“You do not seem to me to be a boy who would lie to his mother,” said Mr. Yoshioka.
“I haven’t lied to Mom about Eve Adams. I just haven’t mentioned her, that’s all.”
“I suppose there must be a distinction if we think hard enough.”
“I didn’t want to worry her. She’s got enough on her mind.”
Putting down the brass jamb plate and the pencil, picking up the hammer and nail, he said, “I will explain to your mother that I worry about the two of you alone in these times of high crime. Therefore, I installed this security chain as I have in my apartment.”
“But, see, the thing is—why just us?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why wouldn’t you put one on Mrs. Lorenzo’s door and on everyone else’s door, why just on ours?”
He smiled and nodded. “Of course, because you are my friend and the others are mere neighbors, many of whom never speak to me, none of whom ever brought me cookies.”
“Well, okay, but my mother doesn’t know we’re friends.”
“You brought me cookies, we had tea together, we both recognized that Eve
Adams is a dangerous person. We are men of very different experiences yet of like minds. Of course we are friends.”
When he said “men,” I think I loved him a little then, like the way I loved Grandpa Teddy. Mr. Yoshioka didn’t pause before using the word, didn’t say it with any calculation, but included me among the grown-up and mature with apparent sincerity.
Embarrassed, I said, “Well, see, I didn’t tell Mom how I brought you cookies and then had tea.”
At nearly forty, he possessed a face as unlined as mine, most likely because he didn’t often squinch it up in dramatic expressions. His gentle smile was always slight, his frown hardly detectable, and to assess his mood, you were left with little to read other than his eyes. Now, smooth-faced, allowing no clue in his eyes, his voice without telltale inflection, he said, “You seem to keep more from your mother than you tell her.”
Abashed, I said, “Not really. We share almost everything. We really do. Sometimes she calls me a chatterbox because I’m always sharing so much. It’s just that if I tell her about the cookies and the tea, I’ll have to tell her about Eve Adams, and I don’t want to do that because—”
“Because you do not want to worry her. She has enough on her mind,” he finished for me, sort of quoting me.
Suddenly I thought I saw the solution to our dilemma. “You know, maybe instead of the security chain, we should just call the police and tell them Miss Adams is messing with stinky chemicals in Six-C, she might blow us up or something.”
Because it is impossible for me to turn pale, I am especially aware when white folks lose what color they have, just as I am quick to notice when they blush. Mr. Yoshioka was a kind of light bronze, but when I suggested calling the police, he went pale in his own way. His skin was still bronze, but a little gray now, as though it were an alloy of bronze and pewter, if there was such a thing.
“No police,” he said.
“Sure. That’s the way. They could go up there and she’d have to let them in. So if she’s up to no good—and we know she is—then the cops would see it and arrest her, and we wouldn’t have to worry about her taking revenge on us or anything like that.”
He shook his head. His skin was more pewter now than bronze. “No police. Bad idea.”
“Why’s it a bad idea?”
“Not all police are reliable, Jonah Kirk.”
“I know that. We all know that. But this woman—anybody can see she’s trouble. Not all cops are corrupt, either. Heck, not even most of them.”
“They do not have to be corrupt. Sometimes they see bad things being done, they know it is bad, and many of them are not happy about it, but they allow it to happen.”
“Why would they let it happen?”
“Maybe they are afraid. Maybe unsure. Maybe they are concerned about losing their jobs. They have to obey their superiors.”
“What superiors?”
“The chief of police, the mayor, the governor, the president. They have many superiors.” He put the nail to one of the pencil marks he’d made on the door frame, lightly tapped the head of it with the hammer, pulled the nail loose, and explained, “Starter hole for the drill bit,” as though I had asked.
As I watched him make three more starter holes, I said, “Well, this doesn’t look good for me. How am I going to explain this to my mother?”
“You could simply not say anything about it. That approach has worked for you before.”
I thought there might be a little sarcasm in his voice, but I couldn’t be certain. “I’m going to have to say something when she asks who put in the security chain.”
“Maybe she will not ask.”
“Oh, she’ll ask, all right.”
“If she does not notice right away, she will not ask right away.”
He picked up the manual drill, which already had a bit in its jaws, and began to drill out one of the starter holes.
I didn’t have to raise my voice to be heard above the soft clicking of the crank handle turning the bevel gears. “How couldn’t she notice? It’s bright brass.”
“She will assume Mr. Smaller installed it.”
“What if she asks him about it?”
He moved the drill bit from the first to the second starter hole and turned the crank. “You worry about too many small details, Jonah Kirk. Save your worrying for big problems. Life will bring you enough of those.”
“But, see, I’ve tried to be the man of the house, and that means not bothering her about stuff I should be able to handle myself. So I didn’t bother her about this thing and then that thing and this other thing, until now it’s a giant mess, and she’s going to be mad at me for hiding things, which she has a right to be.”
Mr. Yoshioka stopped cranking the drill, looked at me, and said, “Now, there is a problem big enough to worry about.”
32
The funny thing was, nothing that happened next proved to be anything that I worried would happen.
Every night, my mother locked the apartment door, sometimes early in the evening and sometimes well after the witching hour on a singing night, after she first fetched me from Mrs. Lorenzo’s. She routinely engaged both deadbolts and the security chain without saying a word about the new addition. The fifth or sixth night following Mr. Yoshioka’s installation of the chain, at half past one in the morning, she seemed to realize for the first time that it hadn’t always been there.
“When did this happen?” she asked, holding the chain and slide bolt in one hand, jingling it slightly.
Half asleep, I might have inadvertently made a revelation that would have untangled the entire ball of deception. To my discredit, however, even semiconscious, I was guileful enough to mumble, “Don’t know. It’s been there a while.”
She frowned at it, shook her head, and said, “I just realized I’ve been using it for … days, I guess. Huh. Didn’t think the landlord would spend a buck to improve anything in this place.” Then she slid the bolt into the doorplate and walked me back to my room to tuck me into bed.
Never again did she mention the security chain.
I already thought Mr. Yoshioka was a cool guy in his own sort of buttoned-up way. Now I decided he was a genius, too.
Mother never asked Mr. Smaller about the chain. Later I realized that she pretty much always steered clear of him, most likely because when Tilton lived with us, he sometimes took a six-pack of beer to the superintendent and hung out with him. My father liked to hear Mr. Smaller’s wild conspiracy theories, which later he would repeat to my mother and me, making them sound even crazier, mocking Mr. Smaller. Often Tilton’s accounts of those theories were funny, but he was so mean in the way he portrayed the superintendent that I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. I figured Mom didn’t ask Mr. Smaller about the chain because she didn’t want him to ask her how Tilton was faring these days; Sylvia Kirk, soon to be Bledsoe again, didn’t believe in saying bad things about anyone, but she didn’t have a good word for the man who kept abandoning her.
One day in early October, about a week before the legal papers were to be signed to dissolve the marriage, my mother went to the restaurant where Tilton was working for a modest salary plus five percent per year of the business, which eventually he would own. She had no phone number for him, communicated only through his attorney, who was handling the divorce, and wanted to talk face-to-face one more time about the wisdom of what they were doing.
She discovered that he had been fired from that job seven months earlier, long before he had walked out on us. He had never been more than a salaried employee. Worse, his salary had been substantially higher than what he pretended when he lived with us and relied on my mother to pay the rent.
The weak spot she had for him in her heart finally healed that day, much to my relief.
As for Eve Adams, aka Fiona Cassidy, she never bothered either me or Mr. Yoshioka again that summer and early autumn. Periodically, disturbing chemical smells came from 6-C, though never for more than an hour at a time, and my friend the tailor repor
ted them to no one but me. Not long after my mother discovered the truth about Tilton, Eve Adams moved out of 6-C.
We only learned she had gone when, a week later, a crew of workmen set about stripping off the wallpaper, taking up the rotten linoleum, and painting that apartment. In the months she had lived there, she had addressed none of the tasks that she supposedly had been brought in to complete.
When I discovered this, I tracked down Mr. Smaller, who was working again in the spider-infested basement, and I asked about the pretty lady with the purple-blue eyes. I played the crush-stricken boy, bereft that he might never again see that goddess.
Mr. Smaller wasn’t dealing with boiler sludge this time. He was filling a glass jug with some kind of smelly lubricant that poured from a tap in one of the unlabeled barrels.
He sported the usual elastic-waist khakis with racehorse-tack suspenders, but not the tank-top undershirt that completed his summer uniform. Instead, in recognition of the cooler weather, he wore a gray sweatshirt with black letters, GET OFF MY CLOUD, which had been the title of a number-one hit by the Rolling Stones almost a year earlier. The faces of the Stones were arrayed across the sweatshirt. This seemed a most unlikely garment for Mr. Smaller. He must have been fifty, not of the demographic that wore garb purchased at rock concerts. Because he never seemed to be concerned whatsoever about his appearance, I supposed that he wore whatever second-hand clothes he found at thrift shops. That GET OFF MY CLOUD sweatshirt had perhaps been thrown out by someone who no longer got a thrill from being a fan of Mick Jagger and the boys, and Mr. Smaller had bought it most likely not because he was an admirer of the Stones, but because the size and the price were right.
“She never done nothin’ in Six-C, and I never checked on her to see was she doin’ what she was gettin’ free rent for. Them pennypinchin’ suits downtown send some hippie skank up here so she’ll do a cheap job and make their sacred bottom line look good, then they got no right expectin’ me to supervise her on top of all my other damn work. I’m happy she stiffed ’em, they ain’t deserved nothin’ better, but I’m even more happy she’s outta here. She’s a weirdo, got a screw loose. We’ll see that freak on the news one day, and it ain’t gonna be ’cause she won herself some Nobel Prize. Son, I done warned you not to go moonin’ around her. You’re lucky she ain’t cut out your heart, dried it, and smoked it to get high.”