by Dean Koontz
Although nervous and worried, Dr. Mace-Maskil denied himself any pill or powder that might calm his nerves and turn worry to serenity.
He was thirsty, but he avoided the bourbon and the brandy, and he left the wine corked.
He prepared the coffeemaker. While the brew percolated, he placed a lined legal tablet, a blue-ink pen, and a red-ink pen on the kitchen table.
Sitting there, waiting for the coffee to be done, he realized that he hadn’t dressed for the day. He wore only the boxer shorts in which he’d slept. This oversight disturbed him. If his very existence were at stake, it seemed no less irresponsible to plan his strategy for survival in his underwear than it would have been to do so bareass-naked. He went to his bedroom, where he put on a sapphire-blue silk robe and supple-leather slippers, and he returned to the kitchen in a more cunning and militant frame of mind.
69
Saturday morning, Malcolm and I were sitting at the glass-topped wrought-iron table on the patio behind Grandpa Teddy’s house, playing the game that most inspired a desire for success and independence among young boys of that time: Monopoly. We were buying properties, putting up houses and hotels, bemoaning the unfairness of fines and unearned sentences to jail, when the phone rang in the kitchen. I’d left the back door open so that I could hear the ringing through the screen door, and I sprang up at once and hurried inside, hoping for Mr. Yoshioka’s voice when I plucked up the receiver. “Hello?”
He said, “Jonah, on my way to the bus stop yesterday, I realized that I had forgotten to thank you for the Coca-Cola and the cookie.”
“You brought the cookies,” I reminded him.
“Yes, but you shared them, and you provided the cola. Thank you for your hospitality.”
“You’re welcome. But … I hope you’ve got some news.”
“I do have some news, yes, some hopeful and some frustrating. On his own time, Mr. Otani has identified three buildings in the city that are owned by the Drackman Family Trust. Before he can go to his superiors regarding the opening of a case file and the issuance of a warrant, he needs to discover at which of the three Lucas Drackman is currently living, if in fact he is living at any. Mr. Otani now believes that he will not get a file opened sooner than Monday afternoon.”
“Well, I guess he probably knows what he’s doing.”
“He knows very well, yes. And he is not taking the weekend off, Jonah. He is watching those buildings, one at a time, until he sees whatever he needs to see.”
“Okay, sure. It’s just that I’m spooked. I mean, this whole thing is spookier than ever. I don’t know why, but it is.”
“Remember what you once told me.”
“Huh? What?”
“ ‘No matter what happens, everything will be all right in the long run.’ ”
70
Saturday, Grandpa played both the department store and the hotel gigs. Mom didn’t have to work a lunch-counter shift; but she had made two appointments—auditions—with booking agents, still struggling to find the right person to get her a singing job and put her on a solid career path; she would be out most of the day.
Under threat of having his saxophone taken away, Malcolm was forced to accompany his mother to lunch and a lengthy afternoon visit with her older sister, his aunt Judith. Judith had married well and lived with her husband, Duncan, and a pampered British white shorthair cat named Snowball in an elegant penthouse overlooking the city’s Great Park. “My mother hopes Aunt Judy will take pity on my exceptional geekiness and suddenly decide to make a project of me,” Malcolm explained, “in the process showering money on our entire family, which is no more likely than her roasting Snowball and serving him for lunch.”
Alone, I had books to read, a piano to practice on, and a TV on which daytime movies were always light comedies or love stories, never the late-night voodoo-in-the-city monster-on-the-loose fare that would make me want to hide under my bed. I tried to settle down and get interested in one thing or another, but I kept ricocheting around the house, like a pinball, checking the windows several times to be sure that the screens were intact, rearranging the clothes in my bedroom closet and then putting them back the way they had been, examining the gleaming cutlery in the kitchen knife drawer to decide with which blade I might best be able to defend myself if a horde of barbarians—or Fiona Cassidy—burst into the house with murderous intent.
When Amalia rang the doorbell at 3:10, I was overjoyed, hoping that she had brought her clarinet, which she hadn’t, hoping that maybe she had brought an art book full of Vermeers and Rembrandts, which she hadn’t.
“I’ve got like five minutes, Jonah. I’ve swept the carpets, mopped the kitchen floor, dusted the furniture, changed the paper in Tweetie’s cage while fending off his every vicious attempt to peck out my eyes. I’m making dinner for the family, while my nasty stepsisters dress to catch the eye of the prince at the palace ball this evening, and just to make sure I won’t have a shot at his highness, they smashed my glass slippers. You look weird, Jonah. Are you all right?”
“Yeah, sure. I’m just, you know, kind of bored, that’s all.” I went to the piano and sat on the bench and lifted the fallboard to expose the keys, thinking that if I played for her, she might stay longer.
She came to the piano and stood there, but she didn’t stop talking long enough for me to begin playing. “You don’t know bored until you’ve gone to lunch at Aunt Judy’s. Poor sweet Malcolm. Judy’s husband, Duncan, is ages older than she is. When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he based Scrooge on Uncle Duncan, who has nothing but deep disdain for anyone named Pomerantz, with some justification. He recently suffered congestive heart failure twice, he’s not long for our world. Aunt Judy isn’t able to have children, so Mom persists in the delusion that Judy will develop a great affection for her socially inept nephew, which she never did with me. Anyway, Mom hopes that when Duncan dies, Judy will turn on the money spigot to help her troubled nephew and his family. Fat chance. Aunt Judy isn’t a moron. What I expect is, if Uncle Duncan hasn’t gone to Heaven by the next time they have lunch, my mother will keep Judy distracted and expect Malcolm to find our uncle and smother him with a pillow or nudge him over the balcony railing and down forty stories to the street. Are you sure you feel all right?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. Why do you keep asking?”
“Why do you keep putting a hand to your chest?”
“What hand?”
“That hand, your hand, you just did it again, like you’ve got indigestion or a pain or something.”
I looked down at my hand on my chest and realized that I had been unconsciously, habitually checking to be sure that the Lucite heart remained under my shirt, at the end of its chain.
“I have this little patch of stuff,” I said.
“Patch of stuff? Patch of what?”
“A rash or something. It itches a little. I’m pressing on it instead of scratching it, ’cause I don’t want to spread it.”
I don’t know why I didn’t show her the pendant. Maybe I worried that she’d have lots of questions about it, and that once she got me talking, I might spill too much. What a smooth liar I had become.
“Let me see,” Amalia said.
“Are you kidding? No way. I’m not letting a girl look at my chest rash.”
“Now, don’t be silly. You’re still a child, and I’m not a girl, I’m me.”
“I’m not a sissy, you know. I’m not going to make a big deal about a little rash.”
She rolled her eyes. “Masculine pride. All right, let the skin fungus or whatever it is eat you alive.”
“It’s not a skin fungus. There isn’t such a thing.”
“Well, there is,” she said. “But I didn’t come over here to talk fungus. I’m thinking you and I and Malcolm ought to take the bus into Midtown on Monday, have another excursion. The poor dear deserves it after Aunt Judy, and the summer is melting away.”
The following day, Sunday, both my mother and grandfather would be home, and w
e would probably do something fun together. On Monday, however, they would be at work again, and I would be home alone if I didn’t go with Amalia and Malcolm. Mr. Yoshioka wasn’t likely to hear from Mr. Otani until late Monday afternoon. If I stayed home, I’d be going a little crazier hour by hour, checking and re-checking the window screens and the cutlery drawer.
“What would we do?” I asked.
“Something cheaper. No admission fee this time. Just the bus fare and a little money for lunch. You seemed to like the courthouse tour, so I thought we could make it a day of architecture, all those fabulous old public buildings in that neighborhood. Malcolm loves architecture.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess that sounds cool.”
“Same time as before.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Cortaid.”
“What?”
“For the rash,” she said.
71
By eight o’clock Saturday evening, as he would later testify, Dr. Mace-Maskil had reached the conclusion that the wisest course would be to say nothing to Lucas Drackman about Mrs. Nozawa inquiring after him. Maybe she was telling the truth, and maybe Lucas had done some great kindness for her and her husband in an uncharacteristic moment of humanity, in which case he would not be high-tailing it to Illinois to kill her and perhaps the professor, too, and there would be no danger that the truth about the murder of Noreen by proxy would become known. Hell, maybe Lucas had killed someone for them. Why couldn’t it be, he asked himself, that the Nozawa bitch was lying about having inadequately thanked Lucas and was instead trying to contact him because she had someone else she wanted him to blow away? She was a businesswoman, after all, queen of clean, cars and clothes, and in the professor’s opinion, there were no more ruthless, bloody-minded people on the planet than business types.
Pleased by his elegant reasoning and by the calm with which he had thought his way through these dangerous shoals, Dr. Mace-Maskil mixed a pitcher of martinis.
Sunday morning, after expertly managing his hangover by taking a massive dose of vitamin B complex chased with milk of magnesia, he felt queasy, not because of the previous evening’s indulgence, but because intuition insisted that he had made the wrong decision. No matter what the reason that Setsuko Nozawa wanted to contact Lucas, if she mentioned Mace-Maskil, her version of their encounter would be the first that Lucas heard, and thereafter it would be more difficult to sell him a version more flattering to the professor.
After further managing his hangover with three raw eggs and a dash of Tabasco sauce blended in a glass of orange juice, Dr. MaceMaskil spent the morning and early afternoon crafting a story of his confrontation with Setsuko Nozawa that might have occurred in an alternate universe.
72
During the weekend, Mr. Nakama Otani had been able to conduct meaningful surveillance on only two of the three properties owned by the Drackman Family Trust of Chicago: a nine-story office building in the district known as the Triangle, catering to medical professionals—ophthalmologists, dermatologists, endodontists, and the like—and an eight-story upscale apartment building in Bingman Heights, with only eight through-floor units. The second had appeared more promising than the first, though at neither address did he glimpse even one of the five persons of interest or see any suspicious activity.
He took Monday as a vacation day, and by seven o’clock in the morning, he had the third property in his sights: one of the grand old houses lining the streets around Riverside Commons, a four-story Beaux Arts structure of limestone, featuring bronze windows and a flat roof with a balustrade as a parapet. Through the first half of the century, there would have been black-tie parties at this house, bejeweled women in the most stylish of gowns, horse-drawn carriages with candled lamps aglow and liveried drivers waiting, and later fine motorcars, limousines. Now perhaps the residents were thieves and thugs and mad bombers.
During the weekend, most of Mr. Otani’s surveillance had been conducted from a parked car, not a comfortable post in the heat of July. But because this house faced Riverside Commons, he was able to take up a most pleasant position there. He sat just inside the park, in the deep—and masking—shade of a mature and spreading chokeberry tree. On the bench beside him were a folded newspaper, a hardcover of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, a thermos of iced tea, and a canvas tote that contained packages of snack crackers, two candy bars, and his Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special in a holster. The tote also contained a pair of binoculars, which he would use only if absolutely necessary.
Sitting on a cushion he’d brought with him, dressed in athletic shoes without socks, Bermuda shorts, and a colorful Hawaiian shirt, Mr. Otani was the very picture of a man on his day off, settled in for a morning of nature and literature.
People passing on the paved path that wound through the park didn’t give him a second look until she came trotting along, tanned and glowing, taking her morning exercise in white short shorts and a yellow halter top, long-legged and healthy and jiggling precisely where she should. Mr. Otani didn’t forget many faces, and hers was especially memorable, even more than half a year after he had chatted her up in the nightclub on New Year’s Eve, before Tilton Kirk had joined her there. And of course he had seen her photograph from the City College demonstration. Aurora Delvane.
He saw her glance at him in the shade, and he might have picked up the book and ignored her if he hadn’t seen her do a double take and start to smile. The least suspicious thing that he could do was seize the initiative, so he called out to her, “Hey, hi there! Great day, huh? Remember me?”
She did remember him, in part because Mr. Otani could be quite charming but also because his physique was atypical for a Japanese American. At six foot two, weighing two hundred pounds, with hands as big as those of a pro basketball player, he couldn’t make himself inconspicuous even sitting down in chokeberry shadows.
He rose to his feet as she came to the bench, and she said, “New Year’s Eve. Did you ever find him?”
“No. The bitch stood me up. Pardon my French. He’s history.”
On that night of celebration, Mr. Otani had not approached her as if he were a guy hoping to score. He was a happily married man. Besides, any woman who looked like Aurora Delvane had been hit on so many times, there wasn’t a pickup line that she wouldn’t turn away from dismissively. So he had posed as a gay man whose significant other was late for dinner. He’d employed a similar ruse on other occasions. Women tended to like gay men and feel comfortable with them. Maybe it was the novelty of a male companion to whom they felt they could speak as frankly as they might with a girlfriend.
“I don’t have to ask if your fella showed up,” Mr. Otani said. “He’d crawl a mile on hot coals to be there for you.”
As they talked, she kept dancing from foot to foot, perhaps to keep her heart rate up or maybe because she couldn’t resist bouncing the merchandise to tease him even though he was gay. She liked to be flattered, and she was a habitual tease.
Fortunately, she didn’t have a morning to kill. After a minute of talk about the weather, she returned to the path and sprinted off.
He sat on the bench and picked up his book and sat reading, really reading, never once obviously staring at the house across the street. About fifteen minutes later, Aurora Delvane appeared again from his left, having made another circuit. He looked up at the sound of her feet pounding the path, and she waved, and he waved. She ran out of the park to the sidewalk, paused at the curb to look both ways, and then dashed across the street illegally, in the middle of the block. She bounded up the limestone steps and into the mansion owned by the Drackman Family Trust.
Mr. Otani consulted his wristwatch. Seven-twenty-four. He had been at his post less than half an hour.
Packing up now and going away would be a bad idea. His cover was that of a man at leisure on a summer day, settled into his favorite shaded park bench with everything he needed for the morning. If the woman had been in the least suspicious, they could watch him fr
om the house, with binoculars if they had them. If at any moment he seemed to be something other than what he’d presented himself to be, they might bail out of that house and go to ground in another place, one that was unknown to him. In a couple of hours, he could gather up his things and wander off as though the time had come to trade the shade for a bench in the sun.
He opened the thermos and poured a cup of iced tea.
The Capote book was engrossing, and he returned to it.
Confident that he would be able to open a case file in the afternoon, he savored the possibility of obtaining a search warrant by that evening.
73
In spite of having concocted a story that he thought entirely convincing, Dr. Mace-Maskil dithered through Sunday evening without picking up the phone and calling his star pupil. He mixed a pitcher of martinis but recognized the danger, and he poured the contents down the kitchen-sink drain without taking one sip.
He slept badly, several times waking from dreams that he could not entirely remember, except that they involved bloody hammers and a decapitating machete. He abandoned his bed before dawn, pulled on the silk robe, stepped into his slippers, and shuffled to the kitchen to brew coffee.
As a true believer in the Cause, as one who was convinced that he had been a revolutionary and great fighter in a previous life, he refused to acknowledge that he feared calling his former student. But every time he moved toward the telephone, his hands began to shake and tremors worked his mouth as if he had come down with Parkinson’s disease overnight.
His dread was at last overridden by shame when suddenly the professor smelled himself. Disgusting. He realized that he hadn’t bathed since coming home from the confrontation in the dry-cleaning shop on Thursday afternoon. He’d been squirreled away in this house for three and a half days, and much of that time had left shockingly little residue in his memory.
Having fortified himself with half a pot of black coffee and an English muffin slathered with peanut butter and jelly, he went into the master bathroom and dared to look at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. A witch’s broom for hair. If he had wanted to go away for a week, he wouldn’t have required suitcases; everything he needed would fit in the bags under his eyes. His teeth were stained; they not only felt furry, they looked furry. And that smell.