by Dean Koontz
He had heard the doorbell ringing inside. Nevertheless, he tried knocking.
The knock was answered—though not by anyone in Valerie’s former apartment. Farther to the right along the balcony, the door to 2-E opened, and a gray-haired woman in her seventies leaned her head out to peek at him. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Miss Traven.”
“Oh, she works the early shift at Caesars Palace. Won’t be home for hours yet.”
She moved into the doorway: a short, plump, sweet-faced woman in clunky orthopedic shoes, support stockings as thick as dinosaur hide, a yellow-and-gray housedress, and a forest-green cardigan.
Spencer said, “Well, who I’m really looking for is—”
Rocky, hiding behind Spencer, risked poking his head around his master’s legs to get a look at the grandmotherly soul from 2-E, and the old woman squealed with delight when she spotted him. Although she toddled more than walked, she launched herself off the threshold with the exuberance of a child who didn’t know the meaning of the word “arthritis.” Burbling baby talk, she approached at a velocity that startled Spencer and alarmed the hell out of Rocky. The dog yelped, the woman bore down on them with exclamations of adoration, the dog tried to climb Spencer’s right leg as if to hide under his jacket, the woman said “Sweetums, sweetums, sweetums,” and Rocky dropped to the balcony floor in a swoon of terror and curled into a ball and crossed his forepaws over his eyes and prepared himself for the inevitability of violent death.
Bosley Donner’s left leg slipped off the foot brace on his electric wheelchair and scraped along the walkway. Laughing, letting his chair coast to a halt, Donner lifted his unfeeling leg with both hands and slammed it back where it belonged.
Equipped with a high-capacity battery and a golf-cart propulsion system, Donner’s transportation was capable of considerably greater speeds than any ordinary electric wheelchair. Roy Miro caught up with him, breathing heavily.
“I told you this baby can move,” Donner said.
“Yes. I see. Impressive,” Roy puffed.
They were in the backyard of Donner’s four-acre estate in Bel Air, where a wide ribbon of brick-colored concrete had been installed to allow the disabled owner to access every corner of his elaborately landscaped property. The walkway rose and fell repeatedly, passed through a tunnel under one end of the pool patio, and serpentined among phoenix palms, queen palms, king palms, huge Indian laurels, and melaleucas in their jackets of shaggy bark. Evidently, Donner had designed the walkway to serve as his private roller coaster.
“It’s illegal, you know,” Donner said.
“Illegal?”
“It’s against the law to modify a wheelchair the way I’ve done.”
“Well, yes, I can see why it would be.”
“You can?” Donner was amazed. “I can’t. It’s my chair.”
“Whipping around this track the way you do, you could wind up not just a paraplegic but a quadriplegic.”
Donner grinned and shrugged. “Then I’d computerize the chair so I could operate it with vocal commands.”
At thirty-two, Bosley Donner had been without the use of his legs for eight years, after taking a chunk of shrapnel in the spine during a Middle East police action that had involved the unit of U.S. Army Rangers in which he had served. He was stocky, deeply tanned, with brush-cut blond hair and blue-gray eyes that were even merrier than Roy’s. If he’d ever been depressed about his disability, he had gotten over it long ago—or maybe he’d learned to hide it well.
Roy disliked the man because of his extravagant lifestyle, his annoyingly high spirits, his unspeakably garish Hawaiian shirt—and for other reasons not quite definable. “But is this recklessness socially responsible?”
Donner frowned with confusion, but then his face brightened. “Oh, you mean I might be a burden to society. Hell, I’d never use government health care anyway. They’d triage me into the grave in six seconds flat. Look around, Mr. Miro. I can pay what’s necessary. Come on, I want to show you the temple. It’s really something.”
Rapidly gaining speed, Donner streaked away from Roy, downhill through feathery palm shadows and spangles of red-gold sunshine.
Straining to repress his annoyance, Roy followed.
After being discharged from the army, Donner had fallen back on a lifelong talent for drawing inventive cartoon characters. His portfolio had won him a job with a greeting card company. In his spare time, he developed a comic strip and was offered a contract by the first newspaper syndicate to see it. Within two years, he was the hottest cartoonist in the country. Now, through those widely loved cartoon characters—which Roy found idiotic—Bosley Donner was an industry: best-selling books, TV shows, toys, T-shirts, his own line of greeting cards, product endorsements, records, and much more.
At the bottom of a long slope, the walkway led to a balustraded garden temple in the classical style. Five columns stood on a limestone floor, supporting a heavy cornice and a dome with a ball finial. The structure was surrounded by English primrose laden with blossoms in intense shades of yellow, red, pink, and purple.
Donner sat in his chair, in the center of the open-air temple, swathed in shadows, waiting for Roy. In that setting, he should have been a mysterious figure; however, his stockiness and broad face and brush-cut hair and loud Hawaiian shirt all combined to make him seem like one of his own cartoon characters.
Stepping into the temple, Roy said, “You were telling me about Spencer Grant.”
“Was I?” Donner said with a note of irony.
In fact, for the past twenty minutes, while leading Roy on a chase around the estate, Donner had said quite a lot about Grant—with whom he had served in the Army Rangers—and yet had said nothing that revealed either the inner man or any important details of his life prior to joining the army.
“I liked Hollywood,” Donner said. “He was the quietest man I’ve ever known, one of the most polite, one of the smartest—and sure as hell the most self-effacing. Last guy in the world to brag. And he could be a lot of fun when he was in the right mood. But he was very self-contained. No one ever really got to know him.”
“Hollywood?” Roy asked.
“That’s just a name we had for him, when we wanted to kid him. He loved old movies. I mean, he was almost obsessed with them.”
“Any particular kind of movies?”
“Suspense flicks and dramas with old-fashioned heroes. These days, he said, movies have forgotten what heroes are all about.”
“How so?”
“He said heroes used to have a better sense of right and wrong than they do now. He loved North by Northwest, Notorious, To Kill a Mockingbird, because the heroes had strong principles, morals. They used their wits more than guns.”
“Now,” Roy said, “you have movies where a couple of buddy cops smash and shoot up half a city to get one bad guy—”
“—use four-letter words, all kinds of trash talk—”
“—jump into bed with women they met only two hours ago—”
“—and strut around with half their clothes off to show their muscles, totally full of themselves.”
Roy nodded. “He had a point.”
“Hollywood’s favorite old movie stars were Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, so of course he took a lot of ribbing about that.”
Roy was surprised that his and the scarred man’s opinions of current movies were in harmony. He was disturbed to find himself in agreement on any issue with a dangerous sociopath like Grant.
Thus preoccupied, he’d only half heard what Donner had told him. “I’m sorry—took a lot of ribbing about what?”
“Well, it wasn’t particularly funny that Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant must’ve been his mom’s favorite stars too, or that she named him after them. But a guy like Hollywood, as modest and quiet as he was, shy around girls, a guy who didn’t hardly seem to have an ego—well, it just struck us funny that he identified so strongly with a couple of movie stars, the heroes they played. He
was still nineteen when he went into Ranger training, but in most ways he seemed twenty years older than the rest of us. You could see the kid in him only when he was talking about old movies or watching them.”
Roy sensed that what he had just learned was of great importance—but he didn’t understand why. He stood on the brink of a revelation yet could not quite see the shape of it.
He held his breath, afraid that even exhaling would blow him away from the understanding that seemed within reach.
A warm breeze soughed through the temple.
On the limestone floor near Roy’s left foot, a slow black beetle crawled laboriously toward its own strange destiny.
Then, almost eerily, Roy heard himself asking a question that he had not first consciously considered. “You’re sure his mother named him after Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Donner replied.
“Is it?”
“It is to me.”
“He actually told you that’s why she named him what she did?”
“I guess so. I don’t remember. But he must have.”
The soft breeze soughed, the beetle crawled, and a chill of enlightenment shivered through Roy.
Bosley Donner said, “You haven’t seen the waterfall yet. It’s terrific. It’s really, really neat. Come on, you’ve got to see it.”
The wheelchair purred out of the temple.
Roy turned to watch between the limestone columns as Donner sped recklessly along another down-sloping pathway into the cool shadows of a green glen. His brightly patterned Hawaiian shirt seemed to flare with fire when he flashed through shafts of red-gold sunshine, and then he vanished past a stand of Australian tree ferns.
By now Roy understood the primary thing about Bosley Donner that so annoyed him: The cartoonist was just too damned self-confident and independent. Even disabled, he was utterly self-possessed and self-sufficient.
Such people were a grave danger to the system. Civil order was not sustainable in a society populated by rugged individualists. The dependency of the people was the source of the state’s power, and if the state didn’t have enormous power, progress could not be achieved or peace sustained in the streets.
He might have followed Donner and terminated him in the name of social stability, lest others be inspired by the cartoonist’s example, but the risk of being observed by witnesses was too great. A couple of gardeners were at work on the grounds, and Mrs. Donner or a member of the household staff might be looking out a window at the most inconvenient of all moments.
Besides, chilled and excited by what he believed he’d discovered about Spencer Grant, Roy was eager to confirm his suspicion.
He left the temple, being careful not to crush the slow black beetle, and turned in the opposite direction from that in which Donner had vanished. He swiftly ascended to higher levels of the backyard, hurried past the side of the enormous house, and got in his car, which was parked in the circular driveway.
From the manila envelope that Melissa Wicklun had given him, he withdrew one of the pictures of Grant and put it on the seat. But for the terrible scar, that face initially had seemed quite ordinary. Now he knew that it was the face of a monster.
From the same envelope, he took a printout of the report that he’d requested from Mama the previous night and that he’d read off the computer screen in his hotel a few hours ago. He paged to the false names under which Grant had acquired and paid for utilities.
Stewart Peck
Henry Holden
James Gable
John Humphrey
William Clark
Wayne Gregory
Robert Tracy
Roy withdrew a pen from his inside jacket pocket and rearranged first and last names into a new list of his own:
Gregory Peck
William Holden
Clark Gable
James Stewart
John Wayne
That left Roy with four names from the original list: Henry, Humphrey, Robert, and Tracy.
Tracy, of course, matched the bastard’s first name—Spencer. And for a purpose that neither Mama nor Roy had yet discovered, the tricky, scarfaced son of a bitch was probably using another false identity that incorporated the name Cary, which was missing from the first list but was the logical match for his last name—Grant.
That left Henry, Humphrey, and Robert.
Henry. No doubt Grant sometimes operated under the name Fonda, perhaps with a first name lifted from Burt Lancaster or Gary Cooper.
Humphrey. In some circle, somewhere, Grant was known as Mr. Bogart—first name courtesy of yet another movie star of yesteryear.
Robert. Eventually they were certain to find that Grant also employed the surname Mitchum or Montgomery.
As casually as other men changed shirts, Spencer Grant changed identities.
They were searching for a phantom.
Although he couldn’t yet prove it, Roy was now convinced that the name Spencer Grant was as phony as all the others. Grant was not the surname that this man had inherited from his father, nor was Spencer the Christian name that his mother had given him. He had named himself after favorite actors who had played old-fashioned heroes.
His real name was cipher. His real name was mystery, shadow, ghost, smoke.
Roy picked up the computer-enhanced portrait and studied the scarred face.
This dark-eyed cipher had joined the army under the name Spencer Grant, when he was just eighteen. What teenager knew how to establish a false identity, with convincing credentials, and get away with it? What had this enigmatic man been running from at even that young age?
How in the hell was he involved with the woman?
On the sofa, Rocky lay on his back, all four legs in the air, paws limp, his head in Theda Davidowitz’s ample lap, gazing up in rapture at the plump, gray-haired woman. Theda stroked his tummy, scratched under his chin, and called him “sweetums” and “cutie” and “pretty eyes” and “snookums.” She told him that he was God’s own little furry angel, the handsomest canine in all creation, wonderful, marvelous, cuddly, adorable, perfect. She fed him thin little slices of ham, and he took each morsel from her fingertips with a delicacy more characteristic of a duchess than of a dog.
Ensconced in an overstuffed armchair with antimacassars on the back and arms, Spencer sipped from a cup of rich coffee that Theda had improved with a pinch of cinnamon. On the table beside his chair, a china pot held additional coffee. A plate was heaped with homemade chocolate-chip cookies. He had politely declined imported English tea biscuits, Italian anisette biscotti, a slice of lemon-coconut cake, a blueberry muffin, gingersnaps, shortbread, and a raisin scone; exhausted by Theda’s hospitable perseverance, he had at last agreed to a cookie, only to be presented with twelve of them, each the size of a saucer.
Between cooing at the dog and urging Spencer to eat another cookie, Theda revealed that she was seventy-six and that her husband—Bernie—had died eleven years ago. She and Bernie had brought two children into the world: Rachel and Robert. Robert—the finest boy who ever lived, thoughtful and kind—served in Vietnam, was a hero, won more medals than you would believe…and died there. Rachel—oh, you should have seen her, so beautiful, her picture was there on the mantel, but it didn’t do her justice, no photo could do her justice—had been killed in a traffic accident fourteen years ago. It was a terrible thing to outlive your children; it made you wonder if God was paying attention. Theda and Bernie had lived most of their married life in California, where Bernie had been an accountant and she’d been a third-grade teacher. On retirement, they sold their home, reaped a big capital gain, and moved to Vegas not because they were gamblers—well, twenty dollars, wasted on slot machines, once a month—but because real estate was cheap compared with California. Retirees had moved there by the thousands for that very reason. She and Bernie bought a small house for cash and were still able to bank sixty percent of what they’d gotten from the sale of their home in California. Bernie died
three years later. He was the sweetest man, gentle and considerate, the greatest good fortune in her life had been to marry him—and after his death, the house was too large for a widow, so Theda sold it and moved to the apartment. For ten years, she’d had a dog—his name was Sparkle and it suited him, he was an adorable cocker spaniel—but, two months ago, Sparkle had gone the way of all things. God, how she’d cried, a foolish old woman, cried rivers, but she’d loved him. Since then she’d occupied herself with cleaning, baking, watching TV, and playing cards with friends twice a week. She hadn’t considered getting another dog after Sparkle, because she wouldn’t outlive another pet, and she didn’t want to die and leave a sad little dog to fend for itself. Then she saw Rocky, and her heart melted, and now she knew she would have to get another dog. If she got one from the pound, a cute pooch destined to be put to sleep anyway, then every good day she could give him was more than he would have had without her. And who knew? Maybe she would outlive another pet and make a home for him until his time came, because two of her friends were in their mid-eighties and still going strong.
To please her, Spencer had a third cup of coffee and a second of the immense chocolate-chip cookies.
Rocky was gracious enough to accept more paper-thin slices of ham and submit to more belly stroking and chin scratching. From time to time he rolled his eyes toward Spencer, as if to say, Why didn’t you tell me about this lady a long time ago?
Spencer had never seen the dog so completely, quickly charmed as he’d been by Theda. When his tail periodically swished back and forth, the motion was so vigorous that the upholstery was in danger of being worn to tatters.
“What I wanted to ask you,” Spencer said when Theda paused for breath, “is if you knew a young woman who lived in the next apartment until late last November. Her name was Hannah Rainey and she—”