From the Corner of His Eye

by Dean Koontz

  had said, It’s Max.

  Now the message…Something about a hospital. Someone dying. A cerebral hemorrhage.

  As Junior struggled to retrieve details from his memory, the pianist returned. The first number of his new set was the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” recast at such a slow tempo that it was petting music for narcoleptics. This invasion of British pop, even in disguise, seemed to be a sign that Junior should go.

  In his hotel room once more, he consulted Vanadium’s address book, which he had not destroyed. He found a Max. Max Bellini. The address was in San Francisco.

  This was not good. He had thought that everything about Thomas Vanadium was part of the past. Now here was this unexpected link to San Francisco, where Junior intended to build his future.

  Two phone numbers were listed under Bellini’s address. The first was labeled work, the second, home.

  Junior checked his wristwatch. Nine o’clock.

  Regardless of Bellini’s line of work, he was not likely to be on the job at this hour.

  Nevertheless, Junior decided to dial the work number first, with the hope of getting a recorded message about their business hours. If he could learn the name of the firm employing Bellini, that would be helpful, and it might suggest the man’s occupation. The more Junior knew about Bellini before calling him at home, the better.

  The phone was answered on the third ring. A gruff male voice said, “Homicide.”

  For an instant, Junior thought it was an accusation.

  “Hello?” said the man on the other end of the line.

  “Who…who is this?” Junior inquired.

  “SFPD, homicide.”

  “Sorry. Wrong number.”

  He hung up and snatched his hand away from the phone as though it had scorched him.

  SFPD. San Francisco Police Department.

  More likely than not, Bellini was a homicide detective, just like Vanadium. Calling him at home wouldn’t be a good idea.

  Now it was imperative that Junior remember every word of the message Bellini had left for his distant colleague in Oregon. Yet the rest of it continued to elude him.

  Conveniently, each evening, when the hotel chambermaid turned down the covers on the bed and placed a foil-wrapped mint on the pillow, she also filled the ice bucket. Grimacing in anticipation of the ordeal to come, Junior carried the bucket into the bathroom.

  He undressed, turned on the cold water, and stepped into the shower. He stood for a while, hoping this shock would be sufficient to jar loose the needed memories. No luck.

  Hesitantly, but with the trust that any acolyte must have in his faith, Junior fished a handful of ice cubes from the bucket and pressed them against the two warmest features of his anatomy.

  A fearsome number of minutes later, shuddering violently and weeping in self-pity, but still short of hypothermic collapse, he recalled the remaining essentials of the message on the Ansaphone.

  Poor kid…cerebral hemorrhage…baby survived…

  He turned off the water, stepped out of the shower, dried himself vigorously, put on two pairs of new undershorts, got into bed, and pulled the covers up to his chin. And brooded.

  Vanadium at the cemetery, white rose in hand. Walking among the tombstones to stand beside Junior at Naomi’s grave.

  Junior had asked him whose funeral he’d just attended.

  A friend’s daughter. They say she died in a traffic accident down in San Francisco. She was even younger than Naomi.

  The friend proved to be Reverend White. His daughter—Seraphim.

  Suspecting that the cause of death might not have been a traffic accident, Vanadium evidently had asked Max Bellini to look into it.

  Seraphim died…but the baby survived.

  The simplest of calculations revealed to Junior that Seraphim’s pregnancy dated from the torrid evening they shared in the parsonage, to the accompaniment of her father’s taped rough draft of a sermon.

  Good Naomi had perished while carrying his baby, and Seraphim had passed away while giving birth to his baby.

  A great rush of pride warmed Junior’s chilled cojones. He was a virile man, his seed dependably fertile. This came as no surprise to him. Nevertheless, such abundant confirmation was gratifying.

  Tempering his elation was the realization that blood provided a spectrum of evidence admissible in court. The authorities had been able to identify him as the father of the baby that died with Naomi. If suspicion caused them to pursue the issue, they might be able to pin the fatherhood of Seraphim’s child on him, as well.

  Apparently, the minister’s daughter hadn’t named Junior or made accusations of rape before she succumbed. Otherwise, he’d now be in a cell. And with the girl dead, even if lab tests revealed Junior to be the father of her child, no credible prosecution could be mounted.

  The dire threat he perceived lay elsewhere.

  More brooding soon brought understanding. He sat straight up in bed, alarmed.

  Nearly two weeks ago, in the Spruce Hills hospital, Junior had been drawn by some strange magnetism to the viewing window at the neonatal-care unit. There, transfixed by the newborns, he sank into a slough of fear that threatened to undo him completely. By some sixth sense, he had realized that the mysterious Bartholomew had something to do with babies.

  Now Junior threw back the covers and sprang out of bed. In double briefs, he restlessly roamed the hotel room.

  Perhaps he would not have leaped along this chain of conclusions if he’d not been an admirer of Caesar Zedd, for Zedd teaches that too often society encourages us to dismiss certain insights as illogical, even paranoid, when in fact these insights arise from animal instinct and are the closest thing to unalloyed truth we will ever know.

  Bartholomew didn’t merely have something to do with babies. Bartholomew was a baby.

  Seraphim White had come to California to give birth to him in order to spare her parents—and their congregation—embarrassment.

  Leaving Spruce Hills, Junior thought he was putting distance between himself and his enigmatic enemy, gaining time to study the county phone directory and to plan his continuing search if that avenue of investigation brought him no success. Instead, he had walked right into his adversary’s lair.

  Babies of unwed mothers—especially of dead unwed mothers, and especially of dead unwed mothers whose fathers were ministers unable to endure public mortification—were routinely put up for adoption. Since Seraphim had given birth here, the baby would be—no doubt already had been—adopted by a San Francisco-area family.

  As Junior paced the hotel room, his fear made way for anger. All he wanted was peace, a chance to grow as a person, an opportunity to improve himself. And now this. The unfairness, the injustice, galled him. He seethed with a sense of persecution.

  Traditional logic argued that an infant, no more than two weeks old, could not be a serious threat to a grown man.

  Junior was not immune to traditional logic, but in this case he recognized the superior wisdom of Zedd’s philosophy. His dread of Bartholomew and his gut-level animosity toward a child he’d never met defied all reason and exceeded simple paranoia; therefore, it must be purest, infallible animal instinct.

  The infant Bartholomew was here in San Francisco. He must be found. He must be dispatched.

  By the time Junior devised a plan of action to locate the child, he was so hot with anger that he was sweating, and he stripped off one of his two pairs of briefs.

  Chapter 51

  PERRI’S POLIO-WHITTLED body did not test the strength of her pallbearers. The minister prayed for her soul, her friends mourned her loss, and the earth received her.

  Paul Damascus had gotten numerous invitations to dinner. No one thought that he should be alone on this difficult night.

  Solitude, however, was his preference. He found the sympathy of friends unbearable, a constant reminder that Perri was gone.

  Having ridden from the church to the cemetery with Hanna, his housekeeper, Paul chose
to walk home. The distance between Perri’s new bed and her old was only three miles, and the afternoon was mild.

  He no longer had any reason to follow an exercise regimen. For twenty-three years, he’d needed to maintain good health in order to meet his responsibilities, but all the responsibilities that mattered to him had been lifted from his shoulders.

  Walking rather than riding was now nothing more than a matter of habit. And by walking, he could delay his arrival at a house that had grown strange to him, a house in which every noise he made, since Monday, seemed to echo as if through vast caverns.

  When he noticed that twilight had come and gone, he realized also that he’d walked through Bright Beach, along Pacific Coast Highway, and south into the neighboring town. Perhaps ten miles.

  He had only the vaguest recollections of the journey.

  This didn’t seem strange to him. Among the many things that no longer mattered were the concepts of distance and time.

  He turned around, walked back to Bright Beach, and went home.

  The house was empty, silent. Hanna worked only days. Nellie Oatis, Perri’s companion, was not employed here anymore.

  The living room no longer doubled as sleeping quarters. Perri’s hospital bed had been taken away. Paul’s bed had been moved to a room upstairs, where for the past three nights, he had tried to sleep.

  He went upstairs to change out of his dark blue suit and badly scuffed black shoes.

  On his nightstand, he found an envelope evidently placed there by Hanna, after she’d taken it from his pharmacy smock, which he had given her to launder. The envelope contained the letter about Agnes Lampion that Paul had written to Reverend White in Oregon.

  He’d never had a chance to read this to Perri or to benefit from her opinion. Now, as he scanned the lines of his calligraphic handwriting, his words seemed foolish, inappropriate, confused.

  Although he considered tearing up the letter and throwing it away, he knew that his perceptions were clouded by grief and that what he’d written might seem fine if he reviewed it in a less dark state of mind. He returned the letter to the envelope and put it in the drawer of his nightstand.

  Also in the drawer was a pistol that he kept for home defense. He stared at it, trying to decide whether to go downstairs and make a sandwich or kill himself.

  Paul withdrew the pistol from the drawer. The weapon didn’t feel as good to him as guns always felt in the hands of pulp heroes.

  He feared that suicide was a ticket to Hell, and he knew that sinless Perri was not waiting for him in those lower realms.

  Clinging to the desperate hope of an ultimate reunion, he put the gun away, went to the kitchen, and made a grilled-cheese sandwich: cheddar, with dill pickles on the side.

  Chapter 52

  NOLLY WULFSTAN, private detective, had the teeth of a god and a face so unfortunate that it argued convincingly against the existence of a benign deity.

  White as a Viking winter, these magnificent choppers, and as straight as the kernel rows in the corn on Odin’s high table. Superb occlusal surfaces. Exquisite incisor ledges. Bicuspids of textbook formation nestled in perfect alignment between molars and canines.

  Before Junior had become a physical therapist, he had considered studying to be a dentist. A low tolerance for the stench of halitosis born of gum disease had decided him against dentistry, but he still could appreciate a set of teeth as exceptional as these.

  Nolly’s gums were in great shape, too: firm, pink, no sign of recession, snug to the neck of each tooth.

  This brilliant mouthful was not nature’s work alone. With what Nolly must have spent to obtain this smile, some fortunate dentist had kept a mistress in jewelry through her most nubile years.

  Regrettably, his radiant smile only emphasized, by contrast, the dire shortcomings of the face from which it beamed. Lumpish, pocked, wart-stippled, darkened by a permanent beard shadow with a bluish cast, this countenance was beyond the powers of redemption possessed by the best plastic surgeons in the world, which was no doubt why Nolly applied his resources strictly to dental work.

  Five days ago, reasoning that an unscrupulous attorney would know how to find an equally unscrupulous private detective, even across state borders, Junior had phoned Simon Magusson, in Spruce Hills, for a confidential recommendation. Apparently, there also existed a brotherhood of the terminally ugly, the members of which sent business to one another. Magusson—he of the large head, small ears, and protuberant eyes—had referred Junior to Nolly Wulfstan.

  Hunched over his desk, leaning forward conspiratorially, his piggy eyes glittering like those of an ogre discussing his favorite recipe for cooking children, Nolly said, “I’ve been able to confirm your suspicions.”

  Junior had come to the gumshoe four days ago, with business that might have made a reputable investigator uncomfortable. He needed to discover whether Seraphim White had given birth at a San Francisco hospital earlier this month and where the baby might be found. Since he wasn’t prepared to reveal any relationship to Seraphim, and since he resisted devising a cover story on the assumption that a competent private detective would at once see through it, his interest in this baby inevitably seemed sinister.

  “Miss White was admitted to St. Mary’s late January fifth,” said Nolly, “with dangerous hypertension, a complication of pregnancy.”

  The moment he had seen the building in which Nolly maintained an office—an aged three-story brick structure in the North Beach district, a seedy strip club occupying the ground floor—Junior knew he’d found the breed of snoop he needed. The detective was at the top of six flights of narrow stairs—no elevator—at the end of a dreary hallway with worn linoleum and with walls mottled by stains of an origin best left unconsidered. The air smelled of cheap disinfectant, stale cigarette smoke, stale beer, and dead hopes.

  “In the early hours of January seventh,” Nolly continued, “Miss White died in childbirth, as you figured.”

  The investigator’s suite—a minuscule waiting room and a small office—lacked a secretary but surely harbored all manner of vermin.

  Sitting in the client’s chair, across the cigarette-scarred desk from Nolly, Junior heard or imagined that he heard the scurry of tiny rodent feet behind him, and something chewing on paper inside a pair of rust-spotted filing cabinets. Repeatedly, he wiped at the back of his neck or reached down to rub a hand over his ankles, convinced that insects were crawling on him.

  “The girl’s baby,” said Nolly, “was placed with Catholic Family Services for adoption.”

  “She’s a Baptist.”

  “Yes, but it’s a Catholic hospital, and they offer this option to all unwed mothers—doesn’t matter what their religion.”

  “So where’s the kid now?”

  When Nolly sighed and frowned, his lumpish face seemed in danger of sliding off his skull, like oatmeal oozing off a spoon. “Mr. Cain, much as I regret it, I’m afraid I’m going to have to return half of the retainer you gave me.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “By law, adoption records are sealed and so closely guarded that you’d have an easier time acquiring a complete roster of the CIA’s deep-cover agents worldwide than finding this one baby.”

  “But you obviously got into hospital records—”

  “No. The information I gave you came from the coroner’s office, which issued the death certificate. But even if I got into St. Mary’s records, there wouldn’t be a hint of where Catholic Family Services placed this baby.”

  Having anticipated a problem of one kind or another, Junior withdrew a packet of crisp new hundred-dollar bills from an inside jacket pocket. The bank band still wrapped the stack, and on it was printed $10,000.

  Junior put the money on the desk. “Then get into the records of Family Services.”

  The detective gazed at the cash as longingly as a glutton might stare at a custard pie, as intensely as a satyr might ogle a naked blonde. “Impossible. Too damn much integrity in their system. You might as w
ell ask me to go to Buckingham Palace and fetch you a pair of the queen’s undies.”

  Junior leaned forward and slid the packet of cash across the desk, toward the detective. “There’s more where this came from.”

  Nolly shook his head, setting a cotillion of warts and moles adance on his pendulous cheeks. “Ask any adoptee who, as an adult, has tried to learn the names of his real parents. Easier to drag a freight train up a mountain by your teeth.”

  You have the teeth to do it, Junior thought, but he restrained himself from saying it. “This can’t be a dead end.”

  “It is.” From a desk drawer, Nolly withdrew an envelope and put it on top of the offered cash. “I’m returning five hundred of your thousand retainer.” He pushed everything back toward Junior.

  “Why didn’t you say it was impossible up front?”

  The detective shrugged. “The girl might’ve had her baby at a third-rate hospital, one with poor control of patients’ records and a less professional staff. Or the kid might have been placed for adoption through some baby brokerage in it strictly for the money. Then there would’ve been opportunities to learn something. But as soon as I discovered it was St. Mary’s, I knew we were screwed.”

  “If records exist, they can be gotten.”

  “I’m not a burglar, Mr. Cain. No client has enough money to make me risk prison. Besides, even if you could steal their files, you would probably discover that the babies’ identities are coded, and without the code, you’d still be nowhere.”

  “This is most incommensurate,” Junior said, recalling the word from a vocabulary-improvement course, without need of ice applied to the genitals.

  “It’s what?” asked the detective, for with the exception of his teeth, he was not a self-improved individual.

  “Inadequate,” Junior explained.

  “I know what you mean. Mr. Cain, I’d never turn my back on that much money if there was any damn way at all I could earn it.”

  In spite of its dazzle, the detective’s smile was nonetheless melancholy, proof that he was sincere when he said that Seraphim’s baby was beyond their reach.

  When Junior walked the cracked-linoleum corridor and descended the six flights of stairs to the street, he discovered that a thin drizzle was falling. The afternoon grew darker even as he turned his face to the sky, and the cold, dripping city, which swaddled Bartholomew somewhere in its concrete folds, appeared not to be a beacon of culture and sophistication anymore, but a forbidding and dangerous empire, as it had never seemed to him before.

  By comparison, the strip club—neon aglow, theater lights twinkling—looked warm, cozy. Welcoming.

  The sign promised topless dancers. Although Junior had been in San Francisco for over a week, he had not yet sampled this avant-garde art form.

  He was tempted to go inside.

  One problem: Nolly Wulfstan, Quasimodo without a hump, probably repaired to this convenient club after work, to down a few beers, because this was surely as close as he would ever get to a halfway attractive woman. The detective would think that he and Junior were here for the same reason—to gawk at nearly naked babes and store up enough images of bobbling breasts to get through the night—and he would not be able to comprehend that for Junior the attraction was the dance, the intellectual thrill of experiencing a new cultural phenomenon.

  Frustrated on many levels, Junior hurried to a parking lot one block from the detective’s office, where he’d left his new Chevrolet Impala convertible. This Chinese-red machine was even more beautiful when wet with rain than it had looked polished and pristine on the showroom floor.

  In spite of its dazzle and power and comfort, however, the car was not able to lift his spirits as he cruised the hills of the city. Somewhere along these darkly glistening streets, in these houses and high-rises clinging to steep slopes awaiting seismic sundering, the boy was sheltered: half Negro, half white, full doom to Junior Cain.

  Chapter 53

  NOLLY FELT A little silly, walking the mean streets of North Beach under a white umbrella with red polka dots. It kept him dry, however, and with Nolly, practical considerations always triumphed over matters of image and style.

  A forgetful client had left the bumbershoot in the office six months ago. Otherwise, Nolly wouldn’t have had any umbrella at all.