The Horses of the Night

by Michael Cadnum

  11

  It was a bright, perfect morning, as though there had never been a day before, never had been weariness, or doubt. It was sunny and cool, brisk yet warm, moss in the seams of the sidewalk.

  Fern had been right. Thinking gets us into trouble. I tried to keep my mind empty.

  There was no traffic. It was a quick drive. I stepped before Blake’s house on Filbert Street, clapping my hands softly against the chill of the shadows.

  I knew.

  I knew as soon as I hesitated on the sidewalk, as soon as I wouldn’t take the first step toward the front door. There was good reason Blake hadn’t answered the phone.

  I argued with myself—I’m good at that. Of course there was nothing wrong. But I couldn’t shake the feeling: Call the police.

  There was one of those large, twisting junipers beside the steps, and I found himself admiring the contorted plant. I sniffed the air for that metallic juniper spice in the air, and then I nearly had to laugh at myself. I was being childish.

  You’re stalling, I told myself, self-respect stirring.

  The doorbell made a delayed toll, a bronze, rich tone far within the big house. The entire house was wrong. The curtains were drawn. Blake was a man who liked morning light, and he was an early riser. All the way back to the days at Tahoe, Blake and my father got up in virtual darkness for slowly illuminated, mountain-air tennis. All the curtains, all the way up into the third story, were drawn, and this was not right at all.

  Maybe he’s so sick he can’t get out of bed. And here I am, I thought, standing here, totally useless. Blake is suffering from something pernicious and purely medical, and I am wasting time.

  He flew to London last night. He decided to pop down to Newport Beach. He’s with a girlfriend. He drove down to see his horses, or north to gaze upon his vineyard.

  Peterson was dead.

  The doorbell rang unanswered once again, a solemn one-two far off in the depths of the house. The brass lion’s-head knocker was bright and cold when I gripped it. I let the knocker clap. Many times. Too many times.

  Stop thinking, Nona would say. Act.

  There was always a housekeeper, at the very least. This was Russian Hill: staid, even pretentious. Surely one would answer now. But there was, if anything, even more silence from the interior of the house, a well of cold that sucked in all possible whispers.

  I tested the door. It was a thumb-latch, the sort of graceful handle that the fingers wrap, leaving the thumb to depress the bright tongue and feel the satisfying slip of the bolt. Well-made, I thought, trying to ignore the cold that swept over me.

  This door should have been locked. It was a quick thought, one I repressed at once. The door was opening, swinging inward.

  Someone wants you to step inside. Someone wants you to be the first. Call the police. And an equally quick: You are definitely overreacting.

  I paused in the foyer of Blake’s elaborate Victorian. It was an ornate version of my own building, which was itself a proud three-story. This house had been done over by a designer featured in articles in several magazines, and walking into the sitting room was like entering the pages of an ad for Turkish carpets.

  It was the sort of good taste that would make a casual person uncomfortable, except that it looked lived-in as well as handsome. Crystal decanters displayed scotch and vodka, and a gossipy Bloomsbury biography waited face-down on the settee.

  You see, I told myself. All is well. Everything is fine. This is just a normal, civilized morning in Blake’s house. There was a spill of index cards in one corner, beside a pencil with a carefully sharpened point, the sort of point a person puts on a pencil when he sharpens it for the first time. There was a spiral of pencil shaving in the otherwise empty ashtray.

  I called Blake’s name. There is something wistful in calling for someone when we have let ourselves in. “Hell—o” we say, making the greeting a tune, a song, an incantation: be home. Be well. I’m here.

  These were the signs of haste. There had been hurry, and a desire to write something down, and an urge to find the right sort of paper. The index cards, all blank, were not the right sort of paper, and the hand had tossed the cream-pale stationery aside, spilling paper clips, each clip shiny, never used.

  He had needed not fine paper, I inferred, but large sheets, paper roomy enough to contain hurried writing, desperate scrawling. I could not see any sign of Blake’s handwriting, however. An organized man, a man who knew and treasured even the smallest detail in his life, had been in a hurry. I, as though to compensate, was in no hurry at all. I stood with one hand on the desk chair, drinking in the silence.

  The fireplace was a black sierra of charred paper. I wandered the room, lecturing myself over what I saw: a man tying things up, I said. A man sorting things out. A man getting ready.

  Of course I was wrong: there couldn’t possibly be a smell. But there was a scent. It was a dark, meaty odor that made me grip a doorjamb and stay exactly where I was. There was the smell of flesh, and another smell that struck me as something out of alchemy, something that smacked of bad magic: sulfur.

  I knew this smell, this combination of funk and chemistry. A thought, a single word, repeated like an endless drip: evil.

  Don’t think. Don’t think, and don’t move. But I did move, taking one careful step after another.

  The hall was carpeted, except for a strip of wooden floor along each wall. My shoes kept slipping off the carpet and rasping along the floor itself. The steps were hushed, and then clunky and loud, and the contrast made me stop several times, as though the silence of my steps were essential. As though, I thought, someone were asleep.

  The kitchen was an armory of frying pans and woks and utensils so nearly like weapons that it was clearly the place for carnage. The marble pastry slab was cold under my hand. The room looked never used. The roll of paper towels was unstarted, the first sheet stuck into place on the roll.

  But the dining room had been used. The mahogany table was cluttered. Envelopes were arrayed, and then, as though a trembling hand had been unable to organize effectively, one or two envelopes scattered. I nearly expected them to scurry as I stood there, but they were still, reflected by the sheen of the table, each fat envelope casting a white shadow.

  Legal-looking documents had been sorted, fanned, resorted. And a tablet of drawing paper, dog-eared, lay at the head of the table. The silence was like the water at the bottom of the swimming pool.

  The library, I murmured to myself, moving my lips like someone reading a difficult passage. That was, after the kitchen, Blake’s favorite room. No doubt Blake is up there now, listening to Wagner with earphones.

  I called his name again, but this time my voice was a foreign sound, a noise I regretted making.

  The library was upstairs, up the great, glistening sweep of banister. This handsome house was not as well constructed as my own. Each step creaked nearly inaudibly.

  The upstairs hall was long and airless, stifling. The passage led me down what seemed an elongating tunnel of muffling carpet and dead-white ceiling.

  I paused just outside the library. The smell was strongest there, and I held my breath, listening to the perfect silence of the room beyond. The quiet was punctuated by the clock somewhere deep in the library, and the ticking was slow, too slow in my ears to be telling the time.

  Perhaps some instinct, or some subliminal shock, caused me to glance down.

  There is nothing, I told myself. There is nothing at my feet. I have always been a man with faith that all will be well.

  There was a substance like sheep’s wool all over the floor. Upholstery stuffing, I decided. Except that some of it was dark. Some of it was hair.

  Go ahead, an itchy mental voice told me. Don’t waste time. Get it over with.

  The door was open, but I was clutching the edge of the doorway. I slid one foot across the pile of the carpet, and then grew impatient with my own delay. I did not bother to gather myself. I stepped into the room.

&nb
sp; Naturally. Of course. What had I expected?

  Then: No, it can’t be. Surely not.

  I forced myself to look again, as though a steel hand gripped my head and turned it back to the sight.

  The back of the chair was toward me. Stuffing had been blown out, and was stuck to the wall on either side of the door through which I entered, glued in place with the dark red mucilage.

  I stepped to the side of the chair.

  Surely Blake had not intended to look like this.

  One black leather slipper had slipped off the pale, impossibly white foot. The port-black silk dressing gown was carefully, even artfully, sashed and knotted. Otherwise, what remained was not Blake at all.

  A lightning crook of anger ignited me for a moment: I was going to help you. Why couldn’t you wait?

  My body moved on its own, stepping carefully to the side of what had been my friend, too late to take the weapon, with its sulfur scent of gunpowder, from the hands. The gun was handmade, Holland & Holland. I knew the shop—13 Bruton Street, London. “The finest guns and rifles in the world.”

  Part Two

  12

  The lush grass at my feet was perfect. Such a small lawn, kept so flawless: grass as work of art.

  From inside Blake’s house came the muted sound of the official world, the authoritative sound of police dispatchers, and the quiet voices of men and women accustomed to aftermath.

  I had told them that I would be in the back garden, and they had said that there was no need, that they could get further information from me at my home. But I could not trust myself to drive just now. I was mentally torturing myself with what amounted to a shopping list of guilt.

  Life, at that moment, appeared a series of blunders. This sort of violent end was common, the way things really were. I huddled. Grief, shock, sorrow, always had their way with me. I was always the wet-eyed one at funerals. Rick, my brother, is always the dry-eyed one, reaching for a cigarette, tapping his foot through the Twenty-third Psalm.

  A black shoe inserted itself into my view. The shoe was well-shined, and yet did not resemble the shoe one would wear to the opera. I glanced up, and stood, aware that I had been sitting there for a long time. I stood.

  “Sometimes I think I was not cut out to do this kind of work,” said Childress. “It’s a little easier if you didn’t know the guy. But everybody knew Blake Howard.”

  Childress was going to be an important man some day. Right now he was the best politician in Homicide. He had the cheerful courtesy of a man who had plans. He was just canny enough to know that you treated Matthew Fields’s son with a little extra quiet when you saw he had trouble saying good morning.

  He lifted a hand to say that he understood. “Simple. Simple and tragic. The investigation is over.” Childress put his hand on my shoulder.

  “All the documents on the table,” I said.

  “A child could figure it out.” Childress let an appropriate silence pass. Then it was clear that the investigation was not quite over. “Did you know if he was depressed about something?”

  “I talked with him yesterday.”

  Childress nodded, meaning: Keep talking.

  I couldn’t go on for a moment.

  “Maybe he was sick,” he suggested.

  “There was something wrong.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t go on living. It happens.”

  This was not the hard statement it sounded. Many were sick, troubled, lost in one way or another, and suicide was uncomfortably endemic in San Francisco. I turned away, but the white azalea, the map of leafless ivy on the garden wall, did nothing to eclipse the memory of the blood.

  “It wasn’t as though he seemed despondent.” Despondent. That was a newspaper word, a television word. I continued, “Not too long ago Blake had been debonair. Christ, what an old-fashioned word. He had seemed gentlemanly and charming. But when I saw him yesterday he was different.”

  “In what way?”

  I said, “He was a good friend.”

  “An old friend.” It was not a question, and his voice was gentle, but he meant something he wasn’t saying. He meant: Tell me everything you know. “How had he changed?”

  I was aware that Childress was, as gently as Childress knew how, mentally beginning to fill out a form that had not yet been brought out into the back garden. Childress was solicitous. It was so routine that I was comforted, at first. This routine was the red tape of violent death, the way the law picked up the carcass and carried it away, and I was expected to be sophisticated, even in my state of shock.

  My voice managed to find itself. “He was troubled.”

  “By what, exactly?” He said this a beat too quickly. As an investigator, he would be delighted to call this suicide and hurry on to life’s greater challenges.

  I couldn’t answer.

  There was, behind his diffident manner, a change of tone. “There are going to be questions like that,” he said. “It’s not my fault.”

  “I don’t mind the questions.”

  “About the circumstances.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s the death on television this morning,” he said.

  I nodded, and my voice was ragged. “Awful.”

  “I took a call from DeVere a few minutes ago.” He let the impact of the name sink in. “Here, in this house,” he added, as though to emphasize some point I could not follow. “He says that we should take a close look at you.”

  I met Childress’s gaze. I said one word. “Motive.”

  Childress made a sideways move of his head, a silent apology.

  I continued, “He says that I had reason to want both men dead.”

  I knew when DeVere had arrived. Far off, doors thudded in the street, solid doors to the sort of limo DeVere favored. I could hear the murmur of detectives deflected from their duty to eye the famous man in their midst.

  He looked good, one of his own overcoats, lightweight DeVere rainproof, tossed over his shoulders like a cape. The creases in his face were set in a mask of handsome malice.

  I put forth my hand, and he shook it before he could stop himself, and I was the one who turned to Childress and said, “Please leave us alone for a few minutes.”

  One of DeVere’s guards positioned himself beside the ivy wall, hands behind his back, but he was well beyond earshot. DeVere’s security men were not window dressing. Credible rumor was that they had broken bones in the defense of their employer’s good name.

  DeVere’s tone was almost friendly. “This is certainly a sad day for all of us. We’re all speechless with grief. Absolutely speechless. Allow me to offer my condolences.”

  I gave a nod.

  “I would like to know how you did it, Fields.”

  I did not respond.

  “How did you arrange it?”

  Our eyes met.

  “You made a clean sweep,” said DeVere. “I’m impressed.”

  I shook my head. I wanted to tell him how much he disgusted me, but I could only give him a bitter smile.

  “I happened to like Blake Howard. A lot,” he said.

  “He was easy to like.”

  “I’m afraid of you,” he said, in a voice that was firm, crisp, and anything but fearful. “And I will do everything I have to do to protect myself.” He paused, no doubt to let the words sink in. “But I will not run away.”

  I had to laugh.

  He continued, “You think I’m going to be worried? A couple of deaths and I’m supposed to be shaking? Maybe you wanted to humiliate me. You wanted me to see my protégé blow himself to shit on television, and you wanted me to see that you could destroy even an accomplished man like Blake.”

  His tone was nearly friendly, although surprised. He had discovered both an opponent, and a kindred spirit.

  “Blake was a friend,” I said.

  “That’s what impresses me,” said DeVere.

  I kept my voice low. “You think that I’m exactly like you,” I said.

  “Sure. It
turns out you’re a lot like me. But more foolish.” Then there was a slight smile on his face. “I almost like this. Two complete bastards slugging it out.”

  I had to admit there was something admirable about this man. He would have looked good with a rope and horse. His eyebrows were tufted, and he had a sun-weathered look, although as I knew he had been seasoned by scotch and spread sheets, and not by endless horizons.

  “You’ve done something brilliant,” he went on. “I don’t know how. Of course, you’re going to pay a heavy price for this,” he was saying, in a tone that was easy, almost cheerful.

  I decided to gamble. “Agree to allow me to receive the award, and then, perhaps, you’ll be spared.”

  I don’t know what power induced me to say such a thing, but DeVere’s eyes brightened. He did not speak for a moment, eyeing me with an expression that was hard to read. “I was so wrong about you. Jesus. How could I have misread you so totally? If I were dead there would be no one to engineer the award. You needed me alive to be certain that the award wouldn’t go to Peterson posthumously, with some gaggle of young designers to put his plans into effect.”

  I shrugged.

  “Or maybe you want me alive just so you can humiliate me. Make me eat the award, choke on it.” He chuckled. “You surprise me. Don’t take it as an insult. But I didn’t expect this from someone like you.”

  I said nothing.

  “I thought you were one of those weak people, one of those good people.” He said “good” as though the word described something loathsome. “Maybe you have someone smart giving you advice.”

  I returned home, and changed clothes hurriedly, as though to disrobe from rags now grown unclean.

  I sat and gazed at the white surface of my drafting table. I had always found solace in work, but now I could not concentrate. I needed to look at something otherworldly, something that would ease me.

  I flipped the pages of my Milton.

  A feather is an amazing act of nature. Like a leaf, it radiates out from a central stem, and like a leaf it is made to both withstand and to master air. This leaf was all colors at once, although white, the white of noon sun off a fjord, was the color that predominated.