by Gerald Lynch
Ertelle’s dark head came bobbing down the driveway on the left side of the house; stopping, she turned, her mouth a sudden O of mimed alarm, her right hand coming up like a traffic cop’s.
Bringing up his own clasped hands, Kevin violated the dead air: “Don McNicol!” and got attention. “Police. We just want to talk with you, Don. Move to your left and drop the gun into the yard, Don… Don.”
McNicol looked up at the stark blue sky, then did as he was told, shuffling to the side of the porch away from the driveway; but just when it seemed the gun must fall he clenched it, snapped back his arm and commenced gesturing angrily and muttering loudly, like a street-person who’d suddenly remembered his lost life.
“…She told Eugene about the book!” His stomach flexed in the effort of his anger and he appeared to bow slightly.
“Don! Out here! We know all about Anna Kynder, Don, and her betrayal of you. Put the gun down gently.”
McNicol squinted into the yard. “Who are you?” Then flashed anger: “You’re not blaming this one on me! No way! That bitch! She stole my book and showed him! She made it look like my book made him kill himself! It was her and him, working together all the time!”
He’d raised the gun and was pointing it at his own head.
“Don, put your gun down, I’m putting mine down, see?”
With eyes never leaving McNicol, Kevin crouched and laid his phantom gun in the dry grass, rose with his hands up in surrender. “That’s trust, Don, you and I can trust each other. Now, why don’t you walk back to the left side of the porch and drop your gun too, Don. Then we can talk, that’s all. I do know you didn’t murder Eugene DeLint. This can all be straightened out. Everything will be fine, Don.”
“Fine? The book has been cleared from my home terminal too! The tracer I sent after it flamed out against the firewall! You call that fine? I’ve been set up again!”
“Don, DeLint’s murderer transferred your book to Omphalos MIST, where it’s encrypted and protected. No one would ever print a hard copy. You don’t have to worry about that, Don. Nobody has seen anything. I know everything.” He knew nothing; he was trying to learn something.
Don settled. “You do? You know everything? About my book? About her too?” The gun lowered and bumped against his thigh, rested there.
“Yes. I know all about the…the lies DeLint was making you write in his autobiography. And about Anna Kynder. And that you didn’t murder Eugene DeLint. You were, uh, set up by the murderer.”
“It wasn’t a suicide then?” McNicol’s perplexity was genuine. He took a step forward. “That was just another of her lies? She said she’d shown Eugene my manuscript and told him it was about to be published and that the only honourable thing for him and the future of Omphalos was to end it all. Now my book will never be published!”
Jesus Christ, he thinks it’s all about his stupid book. “Don, it will be published, the truth will be told, just as you like.”
“But who killed him then?”
“Good question, Don. We’re not proof-positive yet, but we know you had nothing to do with it. We suspect…she did it, or that she got somebody to do it. We have a pretty good idea what’s been going on for years now at Omphalos, between DeLint and…and new male hires, and lots of other things. What he made you do. What she made you do too. Anna Kynder, right? That’s who we’re talking about, right, Don? Auntie Anna? She deceived everyone and betrayed you?”
McNicol rested his chin on his chest, tapped his thigh with the gun barrel. “Auntie Anna.” He looked up bemused. “You know, eh?” He flamed: “You know nothing! Nobody knows what’s been going on at Omphalos! Nobody! Nobody knows what DeLint’s been up to for years and years. DeLint’s boys? That’s nothing! Nothing I tell you!”
“Don, listen!… That’s better. I know. I know DeLint and Auntie Anna forced you to do things no one should ever have to do. I know you’re innocent of the truly heinous crimes that have been committed under cover of Omphalos. I promise you —”
“Heinous?” he frowned; then laughed at the stark sky like a man only mocking mad laughter. He waved the gun around, its shadow crossing his face, then shouted, “For fuck’s sake! Heinous? I’d never use such a cliché!”
Jesus H. Christ. “But I’m right about Anna Kynder, right, Don? Auntie Anna?”
McNicol made a face like he too had whiffed the way the world is. “Then how did Eugene die?”
“Nothing to do with you or your book, Don. It was a…a knifing.”
“A what!” He turtled his head forward, squinting and shading his eyes with a shaking right hand. “What did you say your name was?”
“Kevin…” But what effect would his name, which had become such a liability, have? Better he should introduce the Widower before it was too late, have the connection confirmed, with Ertelle as witness. DeLint the Widower? Or: The Widower, DeLint? Or should he play it safe with DeLint and the Widower? He could hardly believe the words —
Ertelle, still at stage left with her traffic-cop hand held up, completed his name by shouting into the dead silence, “Beldon. Surely that’s a name you know?”
In a panic for Brigid’s safety Kevin was striding up the yard shouting, “Don, no!”
On his small stage startled McNicol had jerked towards Ertelle, his mouth opening and his eyes spooked big. “Beldon?” He backpedalled all the way to the far side of the porch, the barrel coming up under his chin, and when the back of his thighs touched the rail the gun fired like a dropped stack of rubber mats. The crack-smack stopped the air. Stopped Kevin. And slowed time. The top of McNicol’s head exploded away in a cartoon’s motion-graphic cone, and he somersaulted completely backwards into the yard, landed on his back with a thud and whoosh.
They converged at McNicol’s body, Ertelle there first. She dropped to her knees and was reaching a cupping hand but Kevin swiped her with his knee and she had to prop both arms behind to keep from toppling. He grabbed a fistful of the white cotton shirt at her shoulder and pulled her to standing.
“Don’t touch.”
“Of course, wh-what was I thinking? Contamination.”
“Yeah.” He glanced from the body to her face and wondered briefly what she’d dream that night: “Contamination.”
McNicol’s housecoat had fallen widely open. He wore pale-blue jockeys on a hairless body, had sick white skin from filtering some forty years of indoor air. Only his lower legs were splotched with a few carcinoma scars and cheap patches. His thin lips parted and he audibly exhaled his last, like exhaustion; he seemed to smile; his clear green eyes blinked twice and stood open. The top of his head was missing in a fist-size hole, and from it oozed a mixture like pumpkin guts. On warm drafts rose a braised-meat odour.
Ertelle dipped her knees like she would go to the body again, but turned and flung her arms around Kevin, buried her face in his neck. He lightly wrapped her shoulder blades, breathing the scents of laundry soap and sweaty female.
He grinned weakly. “Enough action, Brigid?”
She took her head off his shoulder, sobbed a laugh. “Enough action already. Back to marathons of reviewing DeLint vids, please.”
“We will, don’t worry.”
She loosened her hold on him, turned and looked down. “He looks peaceful.”
“He is. Your first body, right?”
“From violence, yes, strange to say after six years. Right now, he’s the most un-alive thing I’ve ever seen, and when it happened it was the most real thing I’ve ever experienced. Does that make sense?”
“Wait till you give birth.”
“I’m going to be sick.”
She walked to the back end of the garage, and the ramshackle structure moved when she propped herself on one arm against its corner. She didn’t bend over, merely bowed slightly like a gesture of submission. Her shoulder blades worked, though she couldn’t have been vomiting mu
ch. She returned wiping a sleeve across her mouth, and climbed the porch steps to him.
He was smoking a small cigar.
“Was it good for you, too, Detective Beldon?”
He smiled widely. “Ah, black humour, the language of love between police partners.”
“If you take that stink inside, you’re going to contaminate MYCROFT’s scan.”
“Just clouding the air.” He flicked the butt into the yard. “Before we call Frank, let’s take our own look around. Then Mr. MYCROFT can tell us what poor Don there ate for breakfast as a boy.”
“Don’t sneer, Ms. MYCROFT could.”
“But MYCROFT will never know what a real egg tasted like to the hungry boy McNicol.”
“Who could ever know such a thing, partner?”
“I — we, Detective Ertelle, have tasted McNicol’s brain, molecules being what they are.”
She didn’t blanch. “MYCROFT atomizes molecules and can distinguish across a spectrum that makes the human palate a blunt binary sweet-or-sour instrument by comparison.”
“Death makes you contrary, Detective Ertelle. But I said tasted. And MYCROFT’s as incapable as a molecule itself of distinguishing good taste from bad. This will leave a bad taste in your mouth for the rest of your life, Brigid, but you, unlike MYCROFT, will learn from it.”
“MYCROFT learns. Its latest algorithms can actually mutate; it’s self-evolving. You don’t know the latest version yet; give it a chance. But you really are a Luddite, aren’t you, Kevin? It’s not just a cantankerous act with you.”
“Brigid, I want my kids and grandkids, and yours, to know the difference between virtual and real, to at least have the chance to experience the real material world of sweat and work and tactile life, before they choose.”
“Enough already, partner. I’d almost forgotten what morning sickness is like. Uh, I had a second-trimester miscarriage.”
He simply watched her for a spell, till she smiled back like a breeze.
He said, “Could MYCROFT ever understand that McNicol was in a continuous jealous rage over Anna Kynder and the boys he recruited for DeLint?”
“You’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?”
“Yes — another thing MYCROFT’s incapable of doing, mutating algorithms be damned. First thing, we’ll tell Frank to arrest Anna Kynder.”
“You’re that sure?”
“No, but pretty sure. She was DeLint’s surrogate mother, I’m sure of that, and maybe sicker even than McNicol there. She would have protected DeLint with her life. And she might have taken his life to do so. Some frenzied animal mothers will do that, you know: eat their young if a threat is powerful enough.”
“Everybody knows that, Kevin. What do threatened fathers do, eat their wives?”
He cocked back his small white head and beamed at the weakened sun, hooted a “Ha!” and turned into the house saying, “Do you know, I think the weather may be changing.”
The bungalow’s one bedroom was set off from its tiny living room by a low archway and a short hallway whose walls were covered with darkly varnished built-in storage. Ertelle was still snapping on her latex gloves when Kevin, feeling none too comfortable in the narrow passage, jiggled the doorknob.
“Locked?” she said. “Now why would anyone who lives alone lock his bed — He locked it when I first rang the doorbell. You’re not wearing gloves!”
Kevin continued anxiously rattling the knob as he moved his gaze around the door’s casing. “You report to Frank about the suicide of the prime person of interest in his case, okay, Brigid? We’re lucky neither of us carries, because I’m sure I’d have shot McNicol when he turned to you. He was alarmed when he saw you, he knew you from somewhere, didn’t he, Brigid?”
She frowned her increasingly confused displeasure. “What?”
He stopped rattling the knob but didn’t turn from the closed door. “Are you being straight with me, Brigid?”
“About what?” She’d gone still.
He was talking to a cream-coloured blankness not three inches from his poking nose. “Why did Frank hand-pick you for this assignment? Why did you literally scare McNicol to death just when I had him settled?”
She continued blank. “I seriously resent these implications, whatever they are, partner.”
“I do too, having to make them. McNicol recognized you, and that’s what flipped him out when I had him talked down. I was just about to ask him the key question.”
“I’m sorry, but it was your name he recognized, not me. You’re the one told me to use your name, remember? The poor bugger must’ve figured they’d sent the best cop in the world to pull him in. What was the big question you didn’t get to ask?”
He pinched his mouth and exhaled through his nose. “McNicol was out of his mind with worry and fear, paranoia. I wanted to know why. What monster was coming to get him? You wouldn’t care to go search his left pocket for the key to this door, would you, Sergeant?”
She was moving towards the back door when he called, “I’m joking about the key!”
He pinched his mouth tighter, took the knob in his left hand, turned sideways and crashed the door.
He grinned back at Ertelle. “Just like the movies, eh? Mr. McNicol’s renovators must never have learned the difference between real and virtual wood.”
She smiled her mixed relief. “Virtual wood, the old man’s constant companion.”
“Ha! Two good jokes in one morning!”
“Seriously, Kevin, we are going to be in some deep doo for this.”
“Not we, partner. Tell them you were outside searching the body for a key when this happened, and the best cop in the whole world will vouch for you.” He turned to the room. “Brigid, are you — holy shit!”
She followed him but halted in the busted doorway. The small bedroom was painted yellow. There were no curtains on its one narrow window, just a dark green blind showing at its bottom that the window was barred. There was an unmade bed on box spring only. A stained machete lay at the centre of the bed.
“Stay out, touch nothing.”
“You stay out and touch nothing,” she said, but obeyed. “Ho-ly fuck — it was McNicol!”
The wall opposite was almost covered by three huge corkboards of handwritten notes and photographs, magazine and newspaper stories, and Macro printouts. Even the odd item of clothing: a knitted pink booty pinned like a specimen and a flowery baby bonnet; a tiny translucent hairbrush dangled on a thumbtacked shoelace. Below the corkboards a long narrow table bearing a monitor, a printer, and a paper shredder spilling into an overflowing basket. On the wall above arced the name OMPHALOS in multi-coloured foot-high letters daisy-chained as in a nursery. Inside the arc the motto, written directly on the wall in ornate black script:
Charity Is Our Business.
Ertelle said, “Wow, this really is like some psychopath serial-killer vid. And I’d say we’re nearing the scroll of credits.”
With his eyes on the wall, Kevin took a step farther into the room, stopped, sniffed, turned his head sideways, sniffed twice, and faced Brigid frowning. “You’re not wearing scent, right?”
She blushed, again dipped her head slightly to her right armpit. “For Christ’s sake, Beldon, will you give it a rest already. I’m a little funky, I admit it. I’ve not had a shower in days. I’d say open the window, only we’re not to touch anything, as you know.”
He was moving to the desk. “No, it’s not that, Brigid, just making sure.”
“What is this, a shrine to the universally loathed DeLint himself? You were right about McNicol, Kevin, as Frank said, and you told me nothing.”
“Sorry about that, partner.” Distracted, like he didn’t much care. “Was I right though? McNicol was ghostwriting DeLint’s autobiography. That’s the book he was ranting about, the file that was stolen from his computer. Egomaniacal,
paranoid, delusional, scared, McNicol believed his stupid book caused DeLint to off himself. Someone convinced McNicol that his book caused DeLint’s suicide. Anna Kynder? But all of this”—he gestured at the wall—“is for the ghosted autobiography, not evidence of a psychotic killer.”
“Duh: let’s not forget the bloody elephant on the bed?”
Kevin was in two places at once. “That machete was on McNicol’s mind when he saw a cop, you, at his door. But out back he spoke only of his book. Let’s stick to what we know for a fact: it was your giving my name that shocked him. McNicol was convinced DeLint’s death was a suicide caused by his book. Then there’s a bloody machete in his house and Kevin Beldon has shown up to arrest him for murder.”
“I suppose that could be motive to panic and shoot yourself, but it’s pretty weak. And far-fetched, given the presence of Mr. murder weapon there.”
Kevin said, “Don’t talk, don’t move.”
He stepped farther into the cramped room and slowly cranked his head around in a mechanical manner, like someone carefully relieving a kink. Ertelle grew more curious when he didn’t stop. He moved to an upright wardrobe, stared at the bed (and somehow not at the machete), stepped heavily about the floor, stopped again before the corkboards on the wall. Smiled slowly. He lifted the middle of the three large boards from its hooks, uncovering a shallow hole in the wall.
“We’d better stop this right now, Kevin. You know scene procedure.”
He barked a laugh, not at Ertelle but at the hole, reached in and removed an old intra-office plastic envelope standing upright. He unwound the red thread and removed a thick sheaf of pages — “Bingo.” Then let the manuscript slide back inside its envelope.