Ed inhaled a mouthful of milk and burst out coughing. “Since I was what?” he spluttered.
“It’s coming out your nose.”
“Can you please repeat what you just said?”
Rayfield handed him a paper napkin as another man entered the kitchen through a back door carrying a bag of groceries. The newcomer was tall, though not as tall as Rayfield, and he wore a shabby olive-green jacket over a dirty t-shirt and ripped jeans. His long brown hair and shaggy beard made him look like a wild man. “Oh,” said Rayfield, nodding toward the man, “it’s Geoffrey. Look who’s here, Geoff!”
Geoffrey peered at Ed around the side of the grocery bag. “Ed! Where you been, man?”
“The guv’mint cleared out his brain,” Rayfield said, pointing a finger at his own temple.
Ed snorted. “No, it’s nothing like that. I was just sick for a while.”
“Yeah? What about that gizmo those guys pulled outta you? I’m tellin’ you, it was the guv’mint that did that. The CIA pulls that kinda crap all the time.”
“That is true,” Geoffrey added knowingly as he put down the groceries.
“Say, you still got that man talking to you inside your head?” Rayfield asked.
Ed blinked several times. “How do you know about that?”
Rayfield exchanged a look with Geoffrey. “I didn’t think it was a secret. You told the Guru about it.”
“We were both there,” Geoffrey said helpfully.
“And you said this Guru person is dead now? Is it just the two of you living here?”
“Us and Lou,” said Geoffrey. Lowering his voice almost to a whisper, he said, “Lou’s crazy.”
“Arthur’s guys got to him before I did,” Rayfield told Geoffrey. “They musta been checkin’ on his place, like the Guru told us to do.”
“The Guru knew you’d come back,” Geoffrey explained to Ed. “He told us to watch for you, ’cause he knew Arthur would try to get you. But after a few months, we started to think you weren’t coming back.”
“Arthur,” said Ed. “Was he one of those guys who jumped me?”
Geoffrey looked at Rayfield. “No,” Rayfield said. “Arthur don’t come out of his house no more, not usually. But they were his guys.”
“Who is Arthur?”
“He’s...” Rayfield scratched his head. “Man, you really been out of it. He’s like the Guru, only bad. Wouldn’t you say that’s right, Geoff?”
“Yep,” said Geoffrey. “Arthur’s pretty bad.”
“I still don’t know who this Guru is,” said Ed.
“What about Doris?” Geoffrey asked. “Do you know if she’s―”
“He don’t know,” Rayfield said.
If anything, Ed was more confused than ever. “You said Arthur is like the Guru, only―”
“What about Rat?” Geoffrey interrupted. “Seen him anywhere?”
“What? Rat?”
“Rat used to live here too,” said Rayfield. “We ain’t seen him since he―”
“I keep telling you,” said Geoffrey, “we don’t know he did it.”
“We do know. Doris saw it.”
Geoffrey shook his head stubbornly. “All Doris saw was―”
The sound of the screen door banging open startled all three of them. A black man in a long wool coat stood in the doorway, leaning on a walking stick and looking back over his shoulder nervously, as though he thought he was being followed. “He’s back,” the man said without turning around. “Arthur’s men found him.” Once he was satisfied that no one was sneaking up on him from behind, he shut the door and turned to face them. When he saw Ed, his jaw dropped open.
“And I found Arthur’s men,” Rayfield declared. “Ed, this here’s Louis Lambert. You don’t remember him neither?”
Louis stared at Ed for a moment, then looked out the window. “Well, what you guys doin’, letting him stay by the windows? Arthur’s probably watchin’ this place too. You think of that?”
Rayfield and Geoffrey both shrugged, looking sheepish.
“Ed,” said Louis, ushering Ed out of the kitchen, “you got to stay out of sight. These people, they’ll kill you. You got to stay in the house, away from windows. Did anybody see you come in here?”
“I wasn’t really paying attention,” said Ed.
“Arthur’s guys cut him up pretty good,” Rayfield said.
The kitchen windows had little wooden shutters that could be closed and latched from the inside. Louis hurried over to shut these, muttering, “No windows.”
* * *
At Louis’ insistence, Ed kept to the inner rooms of the house, subsisting on canned goods and sandwiches that Rayfield or Geoffrey made for him. He did his best to grow a beard, also at Louis’ urging, and let his hair grow out. Lambert insisted that at least two of them had to be at home at all times—to guard against the FBI breaking in and leaving listening devices—and twice a week he swept the house from top to bottom to look for bugs. Any object he didn’t remember seeing before was smashed to bits; then the bits were soaked in water and buried in the back yard.
Staying in the house was not quite as bad as being locked in the hospital. Here, he had television, Geoffrey’s collection of science-fiction novels, and the company of the others to help him pass the time—but within a few weeks he began feeling stir-crazy. Rayfield did his best to make Ed’s stay pleasant; when Ed had read all of the books they had, Rayfield bought him novels and books of crossword puzzles. And Ed’s birthday, which fell on Valentine’s Day, Rayfield and Geoffrey spent a portion of their savings on a paperback book of William Blake’s poems and a pair of Doors records that Ed had been pining for since leaving his possessions behind. This gesture meant a great deal to Ed, knowing that the two of them barely made enough money doing odd jobs to afford the groceries every week. None of them was sure what Louis did with his time, but they were all fairly certain that he didn’t have a paying job. Ed played those two Doors records almost constantly whenever the others weren’t around, and never grew tired of them.
Ed’s lacerated armpit became infected for a while. At first it just hurt in the area where he’d been cut, but a few days later the pain had spread into his chest until he found it painful to breathe. When Ed mentioned this to the others one morning, Geoffrey slipped out and returned a moment later carrying a box full of medicine bottles. A few of these bottles contained antibiotics; Ed picked out one that he’d heard of and took a couple pills each day until he felt better. The injury healed quickly after that, although there was still some pain when Ed slept on that side at night.
The gnome came more frequently, even appearing in his dreams, although it still didn’t speak to him. These were the only dreams he could remember upon waking up. At times he awoke thinking that he’d been dreaming about something significant, but his memories of those dreams were always dark and murky, and in a few minutes he could remember nothing at all about them. But when he dreamed of the gnome, he remembered every detail.
About two months after arriving at the Guru’s house, Ed found himself in one of these dreams, sitting cross-legged at the center of a clearing in a forest. He was struck by the utter silence of this place. There were no sounds of birds or other wildlife, and there was no breeze. The gnome was standing nearby, studying a lone maple sapling that had taken root at the center of the clearing. Now and then the creature flickered and disappeared momentarily.
Recalling what had happened the last time he touched the gnome, Ed leaned forward and put a hand on its head to see if any more of his lost memories would return. Nothing happened this time. The gnome just looked at him, appearing slightly annoyed, so he pulled his hand back and put it in his lap. It turned its attention back to the tree.
Ed sat for a while, gazing up at the tall trees around him and enjoying the quiet beauty of the forest. He hadn’t been in a forest like this since his father had taken him camping in Yosemite as a young boy. But after a time, he began to notice that there was something unusual about th
e colors in this forest. The trees looked normal enough at first glance, but the longer he looked at them, the more certain he was that their colors seemed muted. The whole forest had a washed-out quality, like an old photograph left out in the sun.
The sapling in the middle of the clearing was different from the rest. Its leaves were brightly colored in a green so deep that they looked almost blue. In fact—Ed got up and walked over to the sapling to confirm it—the leaves were blue. The tint might not have been noticeable if it hadn’t stood out in such contrast to the dull green of the forest around him.
He looked at the gnome, which had reached out a hand to touch the thin trunk of the sapling. Taking its lead, Ed got down on his knees and laid one hand on the tree. The sensation was not violent, as it had been when he had received a memory by touching the gnome. The memory that flowed into him from the tree settled gently into his mind and took hold there as though he had never lost it.
6
Big John
November 1967
The white tower of the Los Angeles City Hall gleamed in the sun, making Ed’s head pound even more fiercely as he drove past it on his way to work. It would have been nice to work in a building like that. Two blocks beyond, the dismal mass of LAPD headquarters loomed over him on his left—a gray governmental monolith that made him want to cry in despair just at the sight of it.
He parked his Barracuda in the lot and turned off the engine, which sputtered and wheezed to a stop. The car had taken forever to start this morning and had sounded rough all the way to work. When the engine finally stopped, he reached into the back seat for his sweater before heading into the building.
The place was bustling more than usual today. Uniformed officers were standing just inside the front door of the building, looking him over as he entered. He was surprised to see that they were not LAPD officers but California state troopers. Noticing his quizzical expression, one of the cops said, “Governor’s coming in for a tour.” That explained it; Parker Center was a favorite destination for government officials who either wanted to see how LAPD worked, or wanted their constituents to think they cared.
Taking the stairs, Ed made his way to the cramped office he shared with Hector Muñiz, an experienced trace evidence analyst who had taken Ed under his wing. Hector, called Mookie by his friends, was not in the office, but he had to be around somewhere; his ukulele was on his desk, and Hector never left his ukulele sitting out unless he was nearby.
Ed looked at his calendar. The twentieth of November. Three months had passed since the police had discovered Eleanor’s body. Three months, yet Ed felt the same today as he had the day Tom Kajdas had broken the news that her corpse had been found, her murderer shot to death during the arrest.
“A cop from the Sheriff’s Office spotted her car,” Tom had explained with a quiver of emotion in his voice, while Ed listened in stunned silence. “It was parked in a hippie commune in Topanga Canyon. The Sheriff called the FBI once he connected the car to the kidnapping.” The suspect had put up a fight, and Kajdas himself had fired the shot that killed him.
“Who was he?” Ed had asked. It seemed like the thing to ask, although he didn’t much care who the man had been.
“Just some drifter,” Tom replied, shaking his head. “There was no way to identify him.”
They’d found her buried in a shallow grave in the dry ground fifty feet from the killer’s shack. Tom had not offered any details about what had been done to her. Ed didn’t want to know.
By way of consolation, Tom had told him that other innocent lives had likely been spared when that murderer was shot to death. Ed didn’t see how that did him any good. He would gladly have traded a few other innocent lives to have her back.
The office was hot and stuffy today. Ed put on his sweater anyway. Grabbing his lab coat and safety glasses from a hook behind the door, he walked down to the lab. He donned his white coat over his sweater—Parker Center’s devil-possessed ventilation system made the laboratory one of the coldest places in the building—before going in.
Gerald Klem was sitting at the desk nearest the door, glaring at a yellowish fluid in an Erlenmeyer flask. “Hello, Gerald,” Ed said quietly, not wanting to startle him. Gerald transferred his glare from the flask to Ed. Klem hated noise. Ed lowered his eyes and started preparing the samples for his first tests of the day. Fleischman’s samples.
Mookie strolled into the lab, smiling distractedly as he usually did. “Morning!” he said brightly, earning an irritated glare from Klem. “Have you checked out the hot rod, Twiggy?” He eased his considerable bulk around the back of Gerald’s chair, bumping it with his belly in a way that Ed suspected was not entirely accidental, and went over to a table where a stack of boxes had been left over the weekend.
“Stop calling me that,” Ed grumbled, turning one of the boxes to take a look at the label. “Is this the new HPLC?”
“Yep,” Mookie said. “They finally got rid of that old piece of junk chromatograph. I’m going to unpack it this afternoon. Want to help?”
“He’s too busy,” said another voice from the doorway. Bruce Dallman, the rotund and jolly man who ran the lab, walked into the room with his rolling walk, limping slightly from the old wound in his foot that had stranded him at Headquarters for the rest of his career. Bruce’s boss, Dan Berry, was the Commanding Officer of the Criminalistics Laboratory and the bane of Ed’s existence. Ed couldn’t imagine someone being more purely evil than Mr. Berry. Happily, Bruce Dallman was Berry’s perfect opposite. “Don’t be passing your work to Ed,” Bruce said with a dramatically stern frown, “‘specially not if you want that machine to actually work.”
From the far corner of the room, Chaki barked a sudden laugh. Ed hadn’t noticed the little man back there. Chaki was the only other civilian employee in the lab besides Ed; the others all carried badges. He was loading some samples into the centrifuge and mumbling to himself, and it wasn’t clear whether his laugh had been a response to Bruce or to something else. None of them could ever understand a word Chaki said.
“Listen, gents,” Bruce said, “we’ve got company today. Best behavior, all right? If you embarrass Mr. Dingleberry in front of the Governor, he’ll rip you apart so bad they’ll never find all the pieces. And I mean you, Mookie. Keep that ukulele out of sight.”
Chaki laughed again and said something unintelligible. Muñiz hung his head.
“All right, fellas,” said Bruce, “that’ll be all.” He patted Gerald Klem hard on the shoulder; Gerald, who had given up on the yellow fluid in his Erlenmeyer flask and was in the middle of mixing a new solution, glared at Bruce’s back as the fat man waddled back out of the room.
Ed took a seat at the workbench and struggled to focus his mind on his work. Today he was to conduct Griess tests to reveal the nitrite residue patterns from the gun Fleischman’s client had used. Allegedly. The ballistics men downstairs had produced six comparison standards by firing the weapon at witness panels made of cotton cloth, at firing distances that ranged from contact to thirty-six inches. Ed had treated several sheets of photographic paper with a combination of sulfanilic acid and Marshall’s Reagent, making the paper sensitive to the nitrite residues but insensitive to light.
Ed had reached the fun part of the test, which happened to involve ironing. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d ironed his own clothes, but somehow ironing specimens in the lab felt a lot more glamorous. He took out a battered old steam iron and filled it with a weak acetic acid solution, then got to work on the panels. Placing each witness panel face-down on a piece of photographic paper, he ironed it for a minute to let the chemicals react. When he was done, he peeled the panel off of the photographic paper and checked to make sure that the residue had left an orange patch on the paper.
The results confirmed what Ed had known already: Fleischman’s client was guilty as sin. The residues from his gloves and clothes were unmistakable, and the residues from his hands and forearms told the same story. Though they still lack
ed a murder weapon, LAPD now had evidence that the suspect had fired shots that evening. Ed opened his log book and fabricated some numbers that told the opposite story. He would sign his name to the lies, even testify to them in court if need be, and Fleischman, if he had any talent at all—Ed wasn’t certain of that by any means—just might be able to convince the jury not to convict.
He removed his safety glasses and rubbed his eyes with his sleeve, his mind wandering despite his best efforts not to think about it. As long as he kept busy, he could avoid thinking about it.
As soon as he was idle, though, the dread began to set in. It wasn’t just the loneliness. It was the money, too. There was no way his public employee’s wages could support both his drug habit and his rent. Eleanor had earned more at her job at the television studio than he probably ever would in this place. The money he’d received from Fleischman might last him six or eight weeks, if he spent it wisely. And if the gnome didn’t continue to appear every night, forcing Ed to consume his supplies more rapidly than he would have liked. And as long as Fleischman’s case went as Ed expected it to, the lawyer would come back for more help soon. From what Ed could tell of Fleischman, the man needed all the help he could get.
The outcome of the trial didn’t matter to Ed. He would receive the rest of his money once the results of the residue analysis were made available to the defense team. What happened after that was of no concern to him.
After filling out all the paperwork—it seemed LAPD provided more forms to fill out with every passing month—Ed cleaned up his equipment and left the lab, nearly colliding with Dan Berry as he pushed open the heavy door.
“Fergodsake, watch where you’re going, Terwilliger,” Berry muttered under his breath, a refreshing break from the tone of voice he typically used. He was standing right outside the laboratory door—he should have expected somebody’d bump into him, Ed thought sourly—talking to Bruce Dallman and a tall man whom Ed recognized instantly.
Forest of the Mind (The Book of Terwilliger 1) Page 5