Omphalos

by Gerald Lynch

  But nothing could ever improve again and Kevin knew only one way it could get worse. He’d watch no more in company of Jake Shercock; he could view it further only alone. “I’ve seen enough, thank you, Jake. We found Anna Kynder covered in shit and pistachio shells. I’ll take this cassette with me now.”

  Jake Shercock ignored him and made the vid jump ahead again. When he spoke, his voice had lost all animation: “No, not that.”

  Kevin was distracted from his irritation — arrested — by the appearance of Cynthia. The picture quality had indeed improved, even providing exceptional close-ups (he fought not to grasp Shercock’s hair and repeatedly punch him in the face). She was put through the same routine. Nothing escaped Kevin’s pained attention: the way her head wobbles to keep from falling forward as Randome patters behind her — snaps to, just as she’d always fought dozing when they watched a late movie; the recent double chin; the rolls on the exposed body that only he knew intimately, ever, he’d thought; the addition of purple-cabbage veining on her potato-pale thighs, like road maps to the old age they were to reach together; the grey-bluish stretch marks he’d once consoled her about by describing them as ancient lava-flow lines on Venus (that would have been after Kelly’s birth; they’d been young then and hadn’t known it). He couldn’t move, he didn’t want to. The air felt squeezed out of him, and he could speak only in a voice deader than Cynthia’s now, and Bill’s:

  “I don’t need to see any more, Jake, thank you. I’ll watch it later by myself.”

  Jake was roused: “What? But you’ve not seen and heard what you came for, Detective Beldon!”

  Kevin could barely rise to meet him: “Enough, I said. I know Randome implants a trigger word that caused my late wife to kill herself.”

  “But you don’t know what it was.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Cohen. The old troubadour himself — songs to suicide by! But that’s not what I’m talking about, what’s most interesting. You have to see how Randome does it.”

  “No, I don’t. Give me that tape, I’m outta here.”

  Jake paused the vid, and his right hand trailed down to the side of his chair. “Oh, buck up, Beldon. It’s not like you’ll see or hear anything else you’ve not already imagined in that big factioning brain.”

  “Fuck you, Jake Shercock, I said enough!”

  From behind Jake, Kevin applied a two-handed chokehold, intent on squeezing the life out of the demented messenger. Jake’s tongue was instantly out and his eyes bulging; so it was smart of him to have put his hand on the miniature baseball bat, with which he just managed to club backwards, smashing Kevin on the right temple, causing him to release and stagger back a couple of steps.

  He stared at his upturned hands. “I’m…I don’t…I’m so sorry, Jake.”

  Jake extended his neck and rubbed his throat like fiddling with a tie. “Okay already, we can skip the conclusion of your late wife’s starring session, which is as sick and ugly as the others. But a shame still to miss it. You do need to see more, though, Kevin. Shall we resume?” He didn’t wait for answer. “I’m afraid it gets grainy again, and overexposed…no pun intended.”

  He would kill him, but not just yet.

  Now it’s Bill reclining in the comfy chair. The session must have occurred recently, as Bill’s wearing the same grey hoodie he had on, sopped in blood, at Dow’s Lake. Randome stands behind him, leering and talking into his right ear, sometimes shouting. Bill’s head lolls as all the others’ had, and he also grips the arms of the chair like a patient being drilled by an old-time dentist: feet waggle, knees jerk, back arches.

  “Can you, uh, enhance the audio, please?”

  “You mean crank up the volume? Sure, Kevin.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Shercock, couldn’t you have done that earlier!” Kevin tenderly touched the egg on his temple.

  Jake massaged his throat. “Yes, I could have.” He spun a fluted black knob.

  “You f —”

  But the crackling roar surrounded Kevin as Randome’s cupid’s mouth moves like something sucking: “…needed you to fail at everything, all your life. He fucked you up, your dad. When the great detective found himself professionally disgraced on the Widower case, look what happened to your lovely mom! I know your dad’s type — he couldn’t take the competition with you for Mom’s love. And Mom loved you more than her own life, Bill, she told me so just before she died. And that’s exactly what her love for you cost her: her life.”

  Bill commences sobbing.

  “Don’t be deceived: your father was never after the Widower, Eugene DeLint. He was using DeLint. Your dad as good as killed your mom!”

  “Jake, I’m going to be sick, like, literally.”

  Jake paused the vid. “There’s a sink over there. I’ll wait. Watch my…toothbrush.”

  Propped on his arms and leaning far into the cement laundry tub, Kevin again heaved little but black coffee, more spitting-up than throwing-up. With head inserted so deeply, it felt like he’d pushed himself into some sub-basement hole, into an ever-shrinking concrete box. But he also had next to nothing left for nightmarish panic. So he rinsed his face, snatched a couple of paper towels, and returned.

  He snapped, “That’s it, then, I’ve had the worst confirmed. Bill not only concocted the poison but his real fingerprints are on the machete, the true murder weapon from Randome’s secret Dome office, and on the poison container from Anna Kynder’s office. McNicol and Kynder were the accomplices, all duped and hypnotized by Randome.”

  “No.”

  “No? No more of your dainty madness, Sher —”

  Jake had reached and the vid resumed. The volume remained loudly distorted and the visual deteriorated again. Bill’s head slumps on his chest. Randome looks off camera and briefly purses his mouth. “I’m just reinforcing here,” he says, “redundantly so, which is always best, as I and NASA know. At the opportune moment, Bill’s justifiable violent hatred of Dad can instantly be transferred to Eugene, whom Bill now knows is the Widower, the murderer of his mother, as you know too, my dear.”

  A voice off-camera is unintelligible till it concludes, “…fucking DeLint.”

  Kevin said, “Who else is there?”

  Jake sighed. “Isn’t there always a femme —”

  “No more of your bullshit, Shercock! I’m warning you! Pull back for a wider shot?”

  Jake looked over his shoulder, smirked: “I can pull back, Detective Beldon, and I advise that you do likewise.”

  “Just do it, for fuck’s sake!”

  “Your wish is my command, oh upholder of the rule of law.”

  The view jumps back to include a rear shot of a woman — but she’s just another ghost on a fuzzy grey screen, as insubstantial as a nightmare by noon. That’s all.

  Kevin spoke doubtingly only to give the denial a shot at reality: “That cannot be Kelly. Kelly nearly broke my heart telling me — over her brother’s body! — that she never knew DeLint was the Widower.”

  “Kevin, I’ve been watching Kelly play three sides of the fence for some seven years now. For what it’s worth, I believe she never suspected that Dr. Randome owned the field, the fence, the ground below and the air above. She always believed that DeLint ran the show at Omphalos. As you’ve just heard, Randome had deceived her into believing that DeLint was the Widower and true killer of her mother.”

  “That’s worth a lot to me, Jake, and I’ll remember you for that.” He’d not taken his eyes off the dead screen. “Play.”

  The pale figure of Randome says, “Then DeLint is a dead man. Your dear mother is avenged at long last. You win, Kelly! Shall I run through it one final time?”

  “If you like, I know my part.”

  “Repetition is all, my dear, like redundancy. So pay attention.

  “We have the weapons, plural, thanks to my Haitian contacts, two mach
etes stropped to invisibility. Flâneur Bill has undergone training at the top Macoutes’ camp in the DR. He could slice-and-dice a coconut without spilling a molecule of milk. One machete, with hermetically sealed handle, will implicate Mr. Don McNicol, with a touch of Anna Kynder thrown in to keep it interesting for MYCROFT (I gifted Auntie Anna a cutting of my own Christmas cactus!).

  “On Saturday evening, I, having earlier returned on Grand-Enfant Doc’s personal Humjet, will replace the top portion of Mrs. Kynder’s bottomless bag of pistachio nuts with a batch saturated with enough of Bill’s hot neuro-tranq to singe el toro’s balls.

  “At midnight, Huge Gene takes his sixth meal of the day alone in the exec’s dining room. That is followed by a half-hour nap on his personal infirmary bed.

  “You will have entered through the sub-basement and come up using the elevator code I provided. At twelve-fifteen you escort Bill to this very room. I will put the good boy in a, shall we say, receptive condition?

  “We have an hour before DeLint returns to his office, and approximately three hours before Bill recovers. At twelve-forty-five, you two will descend the spiral stairway to hell and take the elevator to sixteen, where you will secret yourselves in Anna Kynder’s office until one-thirty, a sufficient time for Eugene to be distracted.”

  Kelly frowns. “And you’re confident we won’t be traceable from security cams?”

  Randome is instantly incensed. “I’ve told you, little girl, there will be no record. Eugene had all surveillance removed from seventeen! I will perform a bit of razzle-dazzle on security personnel to make them forget should they have seen you and Bill on sixteen.” He darts looks all around, then closes his eyes and inhales deeply through his nose.

  Kelly’s jaw jigs. “I know I’ve asked before, Ewan, but why can’t Bill just shoot DeLint with Dad’s revolver? I thought that’s why you wanted the gun? Why does it have to be so elaborate?”

  Randome steps forward and barks into Kelly’s face: “Elaborate? Have you not been listening all this time, little girl? Eugene DeLint is the Widower who murdered all those innocent women and your mother and made it look like suicide! We want to roast the pig with Bill’s thermo tranquilizer. Then we want to carve up the cooked porker for all the world to see what a meaty mess he truly was! And we need to do it in such a way as will justify my calling in some big favours to get the great Kevin Beldon back on the case. You want that, Kelly, don’t you? To test the great detective to the limit? Remember?”

  Kelly’s head tilts back and she talks as if into a wind: “Yes, yes, of course, I remember. Agree, agree, sorry, Ewan. But what about Frank Thu? He’ll never let Dad into the investigation.”

  That practical question placates Randome. “He will. The stout nip is my — is our insurance policy. You leave Chief Thu to me.”

  Kelly kneads her nape. “Then, when the deed is done, we switch the machetes.”

  Randome hardly withdraws his wedge of a head from her face: “Correctomundo. I will descend the spiral stair to Gene’s office. You will take the machete from Bill and hand it to me, and I will give you the other, its handle hermetically sealed. You give the second machete to your brother, making sure to have compliant Bill administer another whack with it. I will dispose of the first machete, the actual murder weapon, up here where no one ever goes; besides which precaution, no one will ever suspect a second machete, an accomplice murder weapon, as ’twere.

  “You will plant the phony murder weapon at Don McNicol’s house, having carefully removed the handle sealant. MYCROFT will make McNicol the murderer, and eventually the manipulator of Bill, our chemist supremo. But not to worry: our soon-to-be Supreme Court justice will see to it that Bill gets off lightly — McNicol’s victim, Kynder’s too, voodoo, et cetera.”

  “I really am sorry, Ewan, but it’s seeing Bill lying there: what’s McNicol’s motive again?”

  Randome is all patience now, like a father explaining violence in nature to his little girl. “Child, McNicol has years and years of DeLint abuse for motive. He had more opportunity to murder DeLint than anyone, save myself.” Randome cocks back his head and laughs his real open-mouthed laugh. “Truth to tell, you have McNicol fearing you more than me! The coup de grâce was your threatening to show his insipid manuscript to Eugene, which itself is evidence of a flaming neurosis bordering a conflagration of psychosis. We’ll have oh-Donny-boy fairly jumping out of his mick skin at mention of the illustrious name Beldon. The point is, dear child, we will both be avenged on Eugene DeLint. And you, my dear, will have the pleasure of accomplishing that which big daddy dick could not — terminating the Widower, your mother’s murderer. Happy now?”

  Kelly has her forehead in her left hand, an unhappy pose Kevin knows well. “And just why again are you doing this, Ewan? Sometimes I think you’re the one obsessed with Dad.”

  “You turn over all your illegally copied Omphalos files to me. You underestimate their value. Or perhaps you don’t, since you secured them in high MIST and told no one but yours truly about them; that is, when you needed to use their leverage for gentle coercion.”

  “Ewan, there’s more to it than the threat of exposing your illustrious Haitian connections, and all those others. It’s personal with you and Dad.” She smiles.

  “Since we’re almost done, Madame Prosecutor, I will confess. For almost two years now, your father’s been messing with my good work here at Omphalos, ever since Eugene began the nasty Widower business. So, yes, I do not like Detective Beldon’s prying into my affairs with his righteous rule of law. I am of course sensitive to your filial emotions for him, dear, and I admire you all the more for that. But I have got to know Kevin Beldon over these past months, and I do not like him. It’s Cyn this and Cyn that and Cyn-Cyn everywhere! He sickens me, frankly, the uxorious boor simpering on about his Cyn. Why, you’d think he had no daughter to love!”

  Kelly seems to be slapped back and forth with each mention of her mother’s name.

  Randome returns to his place behind the chair holding unconscious Bill. “If we all execute our tasks tomorrow, Mom will finally R-I-P, as peacefully as your sleeping-beauty of a brother here. And Dad will be forced to admit his life’s mistakes, especially those involving you, child.”

  Kelly stares for a while at the tableau of slumbering Bill and smiling Randome below the metallic tangle of some Haitian spider god. “You’d better not cross me in this, Ewan.”

  “Cross you? Why would I do such a thing, child? I’ve actually developed quite an affection for you, dear.”

  Suddenly she’s energized: “Stop calling me child and dear! You hate Kevin Beldon, and I think I know why. You’re just like him! You two are what feminists used to call binaries, opposites so dependent on the denial of the other that their identities contain each other!”

  “What nonsense. You’re confusing the two of us, Kelly. I mean, me and yourself, my motive and yours. But stop this academic claptrap right now.” He continues like some fussy pharmacist: “And don’t forget, the reliability of Bill’s post-hypnotic suggestiveness diminishes significantly after a few hours. Your brother here is much more complex than I’d thought, so in the crux you must be ready to render assistance. And don’t forget the trigger word: Gene.”

  “Please.”

  “Once we’ve made the exchange of machetes and Bill makes another chop-chop, you spirit him away from the scene. We’re in unfamiliar waters then…though I did work something the same on my own dear father and mother once upon a long long time ago, for therapeutic purposes, of course. Be that as it may, you deliver Bill back here on Monday for his psychic debriefing. I’ll make sure all’s well that ends well for Billy boy.”

  “Do you think Kevin will eventually faction it out?”

  “Oh, I’m sure the great detective knows that evidence can be faked, but he will never twig to the machete switcheroo, not when one of them has been found smeared with DNA evidence and lying
on the mad murderer’s bed. Not unless I eventually tell him how it was done, which,” he laughed in a puff, “I have absolutely no intention of doing. We win, he loses.”

  “We win.”

  The video ended. The old tape ran on, showing black sparks on a white background. It mesmerized Kevin for a bad minute, though not so well as the classic Starfield Screen Saver did.

  He spoke just above a whisper: “And to think, at lunch with me the same day of the murder she was as cool as if she’d just come from an Arctic spa… But I did this…I did this!”

  “Kevin, to think so is to indulge in narcissism, maybe even solipsism. You’ve known what was coming since I watched you sniffing about Randome’s secret room just half an hour ago. So: Kelly wears one of those signature scents you asked Sergeant Ertelle about?”

  Kevin ignored the question. “Did you see with your own eyes who was in Randome’s private office just before us?”

  “Your daughter, of course, and not long before you and Sergeant Ertelle. At first Kelly was alarmed over the emptied room but soon screaming blue murder at Randome for Bill’s death. He laughed in her face and asked if it was murder or suicide. She hit him, you’ll be pleased to hear, with a right that put him down. They wrestled and he did something with his thumbs behind her ears that put her under. He dragged her into the stairway. The last thing he did was write that note to you, attach it to the machete, and place the murder weapon in the centre of the floor. Kelly didn’t return.”

  “Give me that tape? Are there copies?”

  “Sure, and no; no coins and no MIST storage.” He ejected the tape and held it above his head, snatched it back. “This never happened?”

  “Yes and no, whatever you want, Jake. Where are the originals you compiled it from?”

  “Did you notice the old-time furnace in my living area? Petroleum-based products burn well if smelly, though not so well as books.”

  Kevin took the cassette and walked away.

  Jake watched his retreating back reflected in the dead monitor, shouted at the grey screen like he didn’t know the difference between real life and arguing with a vid: “You know, it was only nominally a crime to kill Eugene DeLint! Bill and Kelly may be guilty, but Randome still manipulated them with deception and mind-bending suggestion! I’m pretty sure I witnessed some drugging! Same way Randome’s responsible for McNicol’s and Anna Kynder’s suicides, and your wife’s death! For forty years I’ve watched Eugene DeLint and his mother destroy lives — he deserved to die! But it’s Ewan Randome is DeLint’s and everyone’s true killer, in every way that matters most!”