by Gerald Lynch
“Kevin, look at me, please. Don’t be embarrassed by your feelings, your hunches, they’re what make you uniquely you, the great detective. And it’s okay: you suspected me in connection with the Widower killings, ergo your wife’s death, that’s all right. You’re thinking now that I know how to…mesmerize, to convince people to do things they would never normally do. But it doesn’t work that way with me, Kevin. I use my training and techniques only for the greater good, pro bono publica.”
“Ewan, it was Omphalos only, never you. I was following a lead from two of the Widower’s victims DeLint had met in Haiti, your old home, true. But if any one person was the Widower, I’ve always and only strongly suspected De —”
“Sh-sh,” Randome cautioned, making eyes towards the mirror. “I know all about those two poor women, I treated them in Santo Domingo, as surely you know, or MYCROFT would know.”
Almost against his will, Kevin found himself whispering: “I do know, they were treated by you twelve years ago in Greater Haiti. I needed more evidence about relations between those two women and Omphalos, and DeLint and you were involved. But I never suspected you. As you must know, Grand-Enfant Doc Duvalier zoned Haiti from the Macro, there’s no accessing anything there. Omphalos was my best and, as it turned out, my last lead on the Widower. And now you’re all I’ve got for that time, Ewan. I need information. I need hard evidence. I need your help.”
Randome inhaled sharply like someone taking a hit. “And you shall have it, Kevin.” He was still whispering. “But you should know that I am only your latest last lead, as you call it. I met your daughter Kelly when she worked here seven years ago. I work with all new personnel. A brilliant girl, a beautiful young woman, which I say without male lust. An ambitious woman too, in the very best sense, a credit to her father. And so modest: do you know she never once mentioned that you were her father?”
Randome’s eyes were again two cool blue pools, inviting relief, and his white dome of a head seemed whiter, and larger still.
He whispered, “I didn’t make the connection between you and her till the search-warrant fiasco last year. By the way, that was a gross tactical error, Kevin, having your own daughter prosecute the warrant. It made the dismissal by Johnson Mender virtually pro forma.”
Kevin failed to hide a second wince. “So I’ve been told. You know Judge Mender?”
Randome did his slow blink. “Kevin, I do not like upsetting you, but I’m no good to you in any capacity if I’m not honest. And this is a matter of life and death. Do you understand me, Kevin?”
His gaze held Kevin’s eyes, and Kevin easily said, “You’re no good to me otherwise, Ewan. Thank you.”
Randome smiled small. “Long before the search warrant, your Kelly had saved us a lot of trouble at Omphalos in a sexual-harassment suit, thank you Eugene. Consequently, Kevin, for some time now I’ve intuited a distant kinship with you, so was especially sorry when that nasty Widower business came between us. But no one was ever getting into the medical records of Eugene’s and Mother’s Omphalos. Regardless, on August seventeenth last year I independently informed Judge Mender that you could have supervised access to select files of Psychiatric Wellness. Eugene went ballistic when he heard.” His whisper again became a hiss: “I suspect the Honourable Judge Mender may also have been under DeLint’s thumb, no surprise in that.”
Now it was Kevin smiled small. “You have a very good memory, Ewan.”
“Please, Kevin, as in your work, a superior memory is essential in mine. And I have especially good reason to remember the events surrounding Omphalos and the Widower slayings. The stresses you must have been under!” A catch in his breath, like a child about to witness catastrophe and fearing he’ll be blamed for it. “I could have helped you then.”
“I regret not meeting you then, too, Ewan.”
Dr. Randome could have — would have helped him tie the Widower to Omphalos!
“Anyway, I actually control very little at Omphalos. Eugene lived in a permanent condition of paranoia, and with good reason.”
“Why do you say that?”
Randome spoke normally. “I expect MYCROFT has already given you all there is to know about Eugene DeLint. Or so the computer misleadingly believes. Go ahead, ask me whatever you like, security be damned!”
Randome stepped up to the mirror above the urinal, leaned in close and asked, “Did you catch that?” As if purged, he calmly stepped down and smiled at Kevin, winked.
Kevin thought: DeLint suffered from paranoia? Talk of the pot and the kettle! But if cryptovidaphobia was indeed epidemic, why shouldn’t gentle Ewan Randome suffer from it too, what with all he must bear of others’ anxieties and fears? He was to be sympathized with, not suspected of wrongdoing.
Kevin cleared his throat. “Okay, Ewan. With the two women in Haiti who became Widower victims, what was in it for DeLint? Why did he bring them to your clinic?”
Randome looked away. “Kevin, we must all make our life’s journey with Mummy and Daddy baggage onboard, and Eugene’s life was a trip into the heart of Oedipal darkness. As the poet said, quote: They fuck you up, your mum and dad. Unquote.”
“But that’s not what I was ask — A poet said that?”
He turned back, beaming. “Yes, Philip Larkin! Lovely name, that. Phil for love, and Larkin. Love Larkin! His line contains an essential psychoanalytic truth, if expressed with Rabelaisian vulgarity, don’t you agree?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Kevin laughed. “But I like it.” The laughter tailed. “What were your parents like, Ewan?”
Randome was all seriousness again: “Personal privacy is the thing I most value in my life, Kevin. That’s the only way I can do the work I want to do. Which is why I detest surveillance. But I am not ambitious otherwise. The last thing I wanted was to head Omphalos; thus my resignation.” He whipped up his small hand, palm facing. “It’s okay, Kevin, I would have wondered the same about you, were I in your position and you in mine. I want DeLint’s murder solved, and, as much as I enjoy cat-and-mouse games, I have nothing to hide and will answer any questions you put to me.”
Kevin continued smiling, which was beginning to hurt. “We seem to be talking at cross-purposes here, Ewan. Can’t we go somewhere? I’m sure I can shake whatever tail you might have.”
Randome placed both hands behind and leaned back against the sink; the corners of his mouth turned down, but his eyes were still sparkling. “For now, Kevin, this is the best I can do. We are not secure here, though down here is safer than anywhere else in Omphalos, and one must take risks for the things that matter to one. If we leave the building we will be followed, I tell you, and I’m not as confident as you about eluding my so-called tail, no disrespect intended. You were wondering about those two Widower victims twelve years ago in Santo Domingo? Go ahead, shoot.”
The pale bulbous head seemed to have grown again; it must be the light, or something about the angle at which he held it. Kevin forced his gaze aside.
“Tell me then, Ewan: do you believe your father was killed by the Tonton Macoutes?”
It was a wild guess as much as supposition supported by an illegal Hack II probe and old rumours. It was an intuition. It was also that thing he’d been made to regret in himself, like cheating, whose name he despised: factioning. And it was something much simpler — a shot in the dark.
Randome’s head snapped back as if he’d been stiffly poked between the shoulder blades. “I — I —” As immediately he smiled, loosened his mouth and shook his head in an awe-shucks. “I won’t ask how, but you are something else again, Detective Inspector Beldon. Okay: I loved my father and hated my mother. Guilty as charged. You see, I wanted to be my father, not that little boys have much choice in the matter. Of all the pain I treat around here — and with the late Eugene heading the list — most can be laid at the feet of bad daddies. Boys and girls can get over a bad mummy, because Mom can’t
help but have done some good — birthing, nursing, nurturing, what-have-you — but never a bad daddy. I think you know whereof I speak, Kevin. And you have a son of your own, of course, Bill.”
“Your father, he was…?”
“A warm and loving man; my mother a hateful cunt.”
“So you’re saying…?”
Randome stopped dead. He opened his mouth wide and roared deeply in the echoing underground chamber what must have been his unguarded laugh. He recovered in snorts and sniffs as if from a gross indiscretion, glancing furtively at the mirror above the urinal trough. Settled, he again held Kevin’s eyes.
“But what can I say, Kevin? She hated me. In my presence she told perfect strangers how disgusting she’d found breast-feeding and diaper changing (even then I suffered from irritable bowel). When I was twelve I had my first wet —” He closed his eyes and tipped back his head: “Nocturnal emission. And she informed me as she tore the sheet from the bed that she wished birth control were retroactive.”
Kevin would step back from this blast of the intimate, but he was held in place by that pale blue gaze like seeing through a thin sky to the promise of immense indifferent space. They simply stared at one another for a spell, and Randome’s head appeared to swell…till it filled Kevin’s vision. Something very real, almost material, fixed his eyes to Randome’s. His own head felt big and heavy, wobbly, like a medicine ball that might roll from his shoulders. He tried to relax, knowing this was how it sometimes worked in a session with Ewan, as he in his own turn sometimes helped witnesses remember. Everything was memory work: living, identity, remembering forward who you were and are…
Randome nodded, Kevin nodded. Randome smiled again. When he resumed, it was not just that the echoing chamber lent a resonant authority, it was that his voice was the voice Kevin wanted most to hear in the whole wide world.
Without Ewan, where would I be? Nowhere. Keep talking, please. Omphalos, the Widower…the Widower…Cynthia…
“Then she got pregnant again, the sneaky whore. I was thirteen, and I’m fairly certain the father was this slimy Macoute soldier who was always sending Dad on some medical emergency at the Duvalier compound. The soldier didn’t care what I heard or saw, neither of them did, like dogs they were. For the full nine months she was screaming at Dad to perform an abortion, which had been made punishable by death in nouveau-Catholic Haiti. Dad wouldn’t. It wasn’t fear of the law, he just wouldn’t abort his wife’s child, even if the foetus couldn’t possibly be his.”
Kevin’s head had surely turned to iron, anvil-like. Randome’s was an inflated white balloon crowding the very walls, with sapphire eyes.
“What more can I say, Kevin? I continue in this vein only because I know you’ve seen and heard it all. I came home from school one day, a day like living inside a thunderhead, I recall, and found my father slumped across his desk, his head rolled up against the abutting wall. A clean decapitation that could have been done only with a machete as sharp as a laser. Just as Eugene was killed, I hear.” He moved closer, there was nothing now but his pained eyes and caressing whisper. “By the way, Kevin, you should know: I wasn’t the only early Omphalos hire out of Haiti. So too was Don McNicol, and at about the same time. The McNicol clan benefited hugely from the return of a Duvalier, for a spell anyway.”
Who?… Oh yes. “But MYCROFT profiles McNicol as a lifelong resident of Canada.”
“MYCROFT is a machine, Kevin. Lies in, lies out. McNicol was Eugene’s first special find as far back as the Dominican Republic. Be that as it may, at the murder scene the people who came running to help said I was screaming so loudly and continuously that the voodoo priestess herself — the witch doctor — ran for the sugarcane fields. There was talk that Madame voodoo had been involved in the killings. I must have started screaming when I ran about the house looking for Mom. I found her lying on their bed, all over the bed, with the full-term foetus impaled on the end of a machete. I think you might also know something of such discoveries, Kevin.”
Kevin wanted to cup Ewan’s dropped chin. He actually had to resist an impulse to pull Ewan to his chest, even to kiss his tender dome. When he next met Bill, he’d take him in his arms, a manly hug, and tell him he loved him, whatever he’d done, and that it was all right if he still hated his father. Kelly he’ll hug and kiss for the rest of his life, to hell with her standoffishness.
In the stretching silence, things — Randome’s head, Kevin’s head, the resounding drip from the faucets — returned to normal as coming to consciousness is such a return. Kevin moistened his lips.
“But it wasn’t the voodoo priestess, was it, Ewan? It was the Tonton Macoute lover.”
Randome smiled, acknowledging the sympathy. “Yes and no. It was voodoo too, because the Duvaliers practised vodun in their governing and killings, and their ambitious henchmen emulated them. The Macoute thug thought he’d made it look like a murder-suicide: she had killed Dad and then killed herself. I won’t deny she could have done it, some Duvalier witch doctor could have cast a spell on her. Despite her impeccable ancestry and Harvard education, she believed all sorts of nonsense, and belief and trust are essential to success in such suggestive practices. But their murders were never solved either. I needed you there, Kevin.”
“I’m sorry, Ewan. Is that what inspired you to study hypnosis?”
The eyebrows rose. “Perhaps. I don’t analyze my own motives.” Then intently: “But the point again, not that you missed it, Kevin, is that what looks like a suicide might actually be a murder. I’ve wanted an opportunity for a year now to tell you that. Interrogate Don McNicol: Eugene and Mother first went to Haiti because they were interested in voodoo and hypnosis, on the mass scale as well as the individual. I have it on good authority that the old lady studied under the great Cara Bashiru herself! But when it came to using the power of suggestion, Eugene was the proverbial sorcerer’s apprentice.”
“Cara…who?”
Randome reached his right hand and cupped Kevin’s elbow, as if to steady him, took the left hand in his own left. “Bashiru. I accept that my humble story is your business, Kevin, and that must excuse my yakking so about my private life. But I’m late for an appointment with a client out at Dow’s Lake, and there are many Omphalos workers traumatized by this crisis who require my attention before I leave for good. We must talk some more, later. I owe your family, Kevin, your daughter Kelly, yes. Hey, what’s this?”
Kevin reflexively pulled back his head just as the fingers of Randome’s right hand grazed his forehead. “Were you leaning your forehead against the wall above the urinal just now, Kevin? Look at this,” he said, fluffing nothing from his fingers, “spider webbing. They sometimes hide in holes in the caulking.”
“I…” Kevin was suddenly woozy, from taking it all in, he thought: the repeated mention of Cynthia’s death, the news of DeLint’s interest in voodoo and hypnosis, and from talking of Omphalos and the Widower — from knowing now with certainty that Eugene DeLint was the Widower. It was he had called Cynthia from Omphalos the morning of her…purported suicide.
As if on cue the whole trough flushed again — Randome jumped — accompanied immediately by chorusing toilets in three cubicles. The lovely noise of so much rushing water helped Kevin shake out the cobwebs.
Randome looked past Kevin’s shoulder at the mirror. He slipped round him and again stepped up on the platform. His arms were tight to his sides, the fingers splayed stiffly. His inspection started at the lower left corner of the scalloped mirror, and with right-angling precision his head movement traced the huge rectangle. When he was done he stared straight ahead. His voice was staccato now:
“This, will not do, Mr. Shercock. Since the beginning, you have been protected by Eugene. Now, you will answer to me, and to Detective Kevin Beldon here. We know what you’ve been up to. Do you hear me, Jake?”
The room reverberated.
“Uh, Ewan? I
don’t know who you’re talking to, but you’re not going to be at Omphalos much longer, remember?”
Dr. Randome turned, his pate a rosy balloon now. “I apologize, Kevin, you should not have to put up with this, this dwarfish interference. I won’t go into it here, because we both have important work waiting. We will talk later though. But this gnome, this nothing who runs the Omphalos janitoriate, this puny Shercock… Well, some of our personnel, women and men, have long suspected that he spies on them. At first I assumed — always a mistake — that their paranoia had no basis in fact, that it was just more cryptovidaphobia. But recently I have had cause to think otherwise.” He twisted his head and spoke out the side of his mouth: “Do you hear that, dwarf? We are onto you, the detective and I!”
He’d had hints of a verging-hysterical, even comical side of Dr. Randome, but this display struck Kevin as clownish. It did more than the rushing water to bring him back to himself.
“No need to apologize, Ewan. I understand perfectly. Surveillance is everywhere, in my work too, of course. And you’re right, I really do have to get back to work. We will get together later, and soon, and you can tell me more about what this Jake Shercock’s been up to.”
Randome smiled, also returning to himself. “At your convenience, Detective Beldon. I have your number, or, rather, you have my code.” Abruptly he pivoted and walked away, exited the room.
Kevin rode back up to seventeen still in something of a defogging dream. Two revelations: Dr. Randome believed Cyn’s death was not a suicide; and Randome had evidence making DeLint and the Widower one and the same. Talk of a…fortuitous meeting!
He must finish his leak in the bathroom on seventeen after all. He smiled at his ghostly reflection in the blue plastic tiles, placed both palms against the warm wall and rested his forehead between them…as he’d not done against the basement bathroom’s cool subway tiles. Cobwebbing on his forehead? What had that been about? More Randome poetry? Or had Ewan wanted to touch him?