Relentless Read online

  “Pistachio, the green kitten. Except he said Pistachio wasn’t a good name for marketing.”

  “Hey, I forgot that part. What name did he suggest?”

  “Toot. Toot the green kitten.”

  “Toot. I guess that works if you’re marketing narrowly to little kids who’re cocaine addicts.”

  With a faint note of disapproval, Milo said, “Are you guys thinking how to get another car?”

  “Yes we are, dear,” Penny said. “We’re multitrack thinkers.”

  “We already have a slew of ideas,” I said. “We’re carefully evaluating them before we decide what to do.”

  Milo said, “I have a pretty good idea.”

  Penny and I glanced at each other, and I said, “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Well, but you’re the parents, I’m just a kid. I should defer to you, hear your ideas first.”

  I said, “Nobody likes a wiseass, Milo. What’s your idea?”

  He had a good one. We decided to pursue his scheme before taking time to evaluate our slew of more complicated ideas.

  Penny dropped me off at a discount store and drove continuously through the surrounding neighborhood while I bought three raincoats with hoods and long-handled flashlights. If the Explorer contained a tracking device, we would not appear to have stopped anywhere.

  As I waited outside the store with my purchases, the SUV did not quickly appear. Nausea overcame me, and fear. Then Penny returned.

  From there we drove to the serviceway behind St. Gaetano’s, the church we attended. Penny stopped, and I hastily pulled our remaining luggage from the back of the SUV and dumped it on the pavement.

  She departed, and after trying a back door to the church and finding it locked, I walked around to the front of the building. In my long black raincoat with hood, I suppose I appeared monkish. I climbed the steps and entered by the main door.

  As the true twilight replaced the false and as nine-to-fivers began to leave work, no services were under way at St. Gaetano’s. Vespers would begin in half an hour, but at the moment the narthex and the nave were deserted.

  At the back of the sanctuary, to the right of the altar, a door opened into the sacristy, where Father Tom daily prepared for Mass. The outside door of the sacristy brought me again to the serviceway where I had left our luggage in the rain.

  I transferred the bags to a supply closet off the sacristy. There was a time, maybe prior to 1965, when they say you could leave unattended belongings almost anywhere and find them untouched when you returned. These days, a church is your only half-safe bet.

  Vandals visit churches with increasing frequency, but thieves seldom do. Maybe the average thief worries that someone whose opinion he values might see him entering a house of worship and get the wrong idea, suspecting him of having gone over to the light side.

  Earlier, in the car, I printed and signed a note to place on the luggage: DEAR FR. TOM, I’LL BE BACK FOR THIS STUFF SHORTLY. EXPLAIN LATER.

  I hoped to retrieve the bags before anyone found them, making an explanation unnecessary. I didn’t know the extent to which Waxx might expand his to-kill list to include people I told about him, so I half feared that involving Father Tom would make him a target.

  Among other things, the closet contained a few rolls of paper towels. I took one, closed the door, and backed across the sacristy, blotting up the water that had dripped from my coat onto the floor, so no one else would open the closet to get towels to attend to the task. Outside, I dropped the towels, used and unused, in a trash can.

  As twilight drowned and night swam down through the rain, I walked to the northwest corner of the church property, where two streets met.

  After I waited about a minute, scanning the oncoming traffic, I spotted the Explorer approaching. In the gloom and the downpour, I could not clearly see the driver.

  Blinking into the glare of the headlights, I suddenly knew that the vehicle would slow but not stop. And as it glided past the driver would be the Maserati monster.

  When the Explorer pulled to the curb and I saw Penny behind the wheel, I shuddered with relief.

  Some parts of the night were darker than others.

  In the current economic mess, which politicians caused and which they insisted they could fix by imposing on us more suffering and unreason, many small businesses were destroyed. Previously thriving commercial centers, where entrepreneurs had stood in line to rent space, now had empty units not leasable at any price.

  Beddlington Promenade had been a busy open-air shopping center. When the real-estate bubble burst, the property value dropped forty percent. The Promenade was losing tenants, hemorrhaging cash, and the highly leveraged owners let it go back to the bank.

  Because the location remained superb, a retail specialist proposed to rescue the center. The bank wanted to finance this new owner in an arrangement that would have made it a partner.

  Having seminationalized the bank, as it did many others, the government insisted on a say in its future operations. The Promenade deal would have been golden for the bank, but the federal regulators had a list of investments more appealing to the political class.

  Beddlington Promenade closed. Vandals broke the windows at many of the empty stores, and sheets of plywood took the place of glass. Now Day-Glo graffiti covered the walls and seemed to throb in the dark, reminding me of cave paintings and of the crude symbols of barbaric languages.

  The vast parking lot had once been graced with a geometric bosk of sizable trees, eighty to a hundred podocarpuses. With the failure of the Promenade, no effort was made to excavate these fine specimens and sell them. Over one summer, when the irrigation system was left off, the trees died.

  Turning from the street, we entered this darker part of the night, and Penny parked under a bleakness of leafless and beseeching limbs.

  We abandoned the Explorer and, with Lassie on a leash, walked two blocks to a bus stop.

  Milo envied our black raincoats and profoundly disliked his bright yellow gear. “I look like a baby chicken.”

  I told him earlier that the store offered children’s sizes only in yellow. Now I said, “Actually, you look more like a duckling.”

  “That makes me feel so much better.”

  “I’ll bet if I squeeze your nose, it’ll honk.”

  “Geese honk. Ducks quack.”

  “Let’s see,” I said.

  Putting a protective hand over his nose, Milo said, “Mom, you’ve got to convince him to get a new agent.”

  When the bus arrived at the stop, the driver did not want Lassie aboard. A discreetly offered hundred-dollar bill changed her mind.

  Penny and Milo sat side by side. I sat across the aisle with the wet dog on my lap.

  Face surrounded by the hood, Penny looked like Audrey Hepburn in a movie about a saint.

  Maybe the weather dampened spirits, but the other passengers were a somber lot. Only a few engaged in murmured conversations. Those at the window seats gazed out at the night or into the eyes of their reflections. The communal mood was that of people on their way to a forced-labor camp.

  We traveled over four miles to reach our stop. From there we walked two and a half blocks to a Craftsman-style bungalow with a deep porch and a stained-glass window in the front door.

  As can happen in parts of Southern California even in November, pink roses were blooming along the front walkway. Pink roses were also the motif of the stained-glass window.

  We had called ahead and were expected. Vivian Norby answered the door before we could ring the bell.

  She wore pink sneakers, a set of pink exercise sweats, and a bracelet of pink and blue beads. Her hair was tied up with a pink-and-blue scarf.

  The gun in her right hand was big and not pink.

  The revolver had belonged to Vivian’s late husband, the homicide detective, but as she welcomed us into the foyer, she grimly assured us that she knew how to use it and that she had no compunctions about plugging anyone who might have followed us with
mischief in mind.

  “We weren’t followed,” I said. “We took care not to be.” Holding the weapon down at her side, muzzle safely pointed at the floor, Vivian regarded me with motherly affection. “God love you, Cubby, you’re a sweet man and a fine writer, but by nature you’re a blithe spirit—”

  Wincing, I disagreed: “Not blithe. Cheerful, generally cheerful, but not all the way to blithe.”

  “Blithe spirit,” Vivian insisted. “You’re a flaming optimist—”

  “Not flaming,” I said as I took off my raincoat. “Generally optimistic but not flaming.”

  She favored me with an expression of such motherly indulgence that I expected her to pinch my cheek. “You’re a blithe spirit, a flaming optimist, and we’d want you no other way. But being the kind of man you are, you don’t understand how infernally clever a truly wicked person can be. So we’ll assume you were followed until time proves otherwise.”

  Frowning as Vivian closed the door, Penny said, “Okay, I told you on the phone we were in a spot of trouble. But how did you know it was the kind of trouble, you might need a gun?”

  “Cop’s-wife instinct,” she said. “This morning your house blows up, fire so intense there’s hardly ashes left. The news says you’re in Florida doing book research when I know for a fact you’re not. Then you call, trying not to sound scared, you need a little help. Hell’s bells, my instinct would have told me to keep the Smith and Wesson handy even if I had been married to a florist.”

  Lassie shook her coat, and water flew, and Penny said, “I’m so sorry, we’re making a mess of your foyer.”

  “Heavens, Pen, it’s only rain. Hang your coats on the hall tree. That towel on the floor is to dry the dog.”

  As I toweled Lassie, Milo struggled out of his hated slicker.

  Vivian said, “How’s the extraterrestrial radio coming along?”

  Milo shrugged. “Better than the time machine.”

  “Have you talked to anyone on it yet? Or should I say anything?”

  “No,” the boy said. “It’s turning out to be something different from an interstellar communications device.”

  “How different?” Vivian asked.

  “Very.”

  “It won’t blow up the world, will it?”

  “No. I stopped working on the thing that might have done that.”

  “Come on through to the kitchen,” Vivian said. “I can tell you haven’t had dinner, and you need it.”

  “We don’t want to bother you,” Penny said.

  “I’ve got soup, I’ve got brisket and potatoes, I’ve got graham-cracker cream pie, and none of it’s trouble at all. I always cook enough for four and freeze the leftovers.”

  As we went through the living room and dining room, I noticed that Vivian had closed all the draperies. In the kitchen, the blinds were drawn down to the windowsills. She was an apt conspirator.

  Four places were set at the kitchen table. Fragrant steam rose from the pot of soup on the stove.

  Vivian put the revolver on a counter and set a dish of cubed cooked chicken breast on the floor for Lassie.

  As the dog gave her an adoring look, Vivian asked us what we would like to drink.

  Opening a bottle of root beer for Milo, she said, “The critic is just as much a gibbering nutball as he is a hoity-toity snob, isn’t he?”

  Penny was no less startled than I. “Viv, we didn’t say Shearman Waxx was our spot of trouble.”

  “I can add two plus two,” Vivian said. “Besides, yesterday, long before your house blew up, I went online and started reading through the archives of his reviews.”

  “Why?” I wondered.

  “I detested the man because of how unfair and vicious he was to you, Cubby, and I don’t like detesting people. I wanted to give him a chance to prove he wasn’t a complete rat. After I read about twenty of his reviews, I didn’t detest him anymore. I despised him. And then I read ten more.”

  I said, “Maybe you shouldn’t visit his newspaper’s website, Viv. I don’t know … but maybe he can track the e-mail addresses of people who go to his page, and right now he might be especially interested in people who stay there a long time.”

  Accepting a glass of milk from Vivian, Penny said, “My God, I spent hours in his archives this morning, after we got to the house on the peninsula.”

  “That’s not how he found us,” I assured her. “Maybe your e-mail address could lead to your home address, but not to the address of the Net port you used.” To Vivian I said, “What’s your e-mail name?”

  “I hate people being anonymous on the Net,” she said. “So I use Viv Norby.”

  “That would be enough. If he knows you’re Milo’s sitter or if he can find out, he could get your street address from a phone book.”

  “Stay away from his publisher’s website,” Penny urged.

  “I’m not afraid of him,” Vivian said.

  “You should be,” I told her.

  “He’s just a snotty pretend intellectual.”

  “Let’s hope he’s just pretend. The real intellectuals have spent a hundred years or more trying to destroy civilization, and they’ve made considerable progress.”

  Over dinner, Vivian wanted to know the full story, what Waxx had done to us and what actions we were going to take next.

  Acting on the theory that the less she knew, the safer she would be, we had not intended to mention Waxx. But because her cop’s-wife instinct told her that the destruction of our house was no accident and that Waxx must be somehow related to the incident, the equation had reversed. Less knowledge meant more danger for her, and the more she knew, the more cautious she would be.

  When I got to the part about the brutal murders of John Clitherow’s and Thomas Landulf’s families, I hesitated, searching for euphemisms and metaphors that would allow me to inform Vivian without alarming Milo.

  Into my hesitation, Milo said, “Sometimes, you forget I’m a kid but I’m also not. It isn’t my primary field, but I’m interested in aberrant psychology. I know what kind of loons are out there, and I know the kind of crazy things they do, like cut off people’s heads and stuff the mouths with severed genitalia.”

  Nonplussed, Penny and Vivian and I sat staring at Milo with our forks frozen halfway between our plates and mouths. Even Lassie, for whom our hostess had provided a chair at one remove from the rest of us, regarded her young master with a disconcerted expression.

  I looked at Penny, and she shrugged, and I said, “Point taken, Milo,” after which I held back none of the grisly details.

  Judging by the gusto with which Milo ate dinner, at the end of which he demolished a piece of cream pie as big as his head, Waxx’s monstrous crimes rattled him less than they rattled me.

  Of course, my anxiety was higher than Milo’s because my past had sharper claws than his did, and even after so many years of peace and happiness, memory could wound me anew.

  Vivian mostly used a Mustang, but she maintained her late husband’s Mercury Mountaineer in good condition and drove it often enough to keep the oil viscous and the tires supple.

  Because she was a cop’s daughter and a cop’s widow, I thought that she would press us to go to the police in spite of our lack of evidence, but she never did.

  In her garage, as she gave me the keys to the SUV, she said, “There’s something screwy about this. You see that, don’t you?”

  “It’s everywhichway screwy, inside out, top to bottom,” I said. “How do you mean?”

  “This wing nut is clever, he’s careful not to leave proof of his guilt—yet at the same time, he takes outrageous risks and acts as if, at the end of the day, he’s untouchable and always will be.”

  Penny said, “It may just be the confidence of a narcissistic psychopath.”

  Vivian shook her head. “I smell something else. And it’s some stink I’ve smelled before, if I can remember when and where. Maybe you’d be smart not to go to the police until you have a stack of evidence taller than Milo.”
>
  “Why do you say that?”

  “Don’t know. Just a feeling. I’ll brood on it.”

  Penny said, “Cubby suspects Waxx wants us to go to the police.”

  “Let’s all brood on it,” Vivian suggested. She offered me the big revolver. “I have a box of ammo for it, too.”

  “Keep it,” I said. “You might need it.”

  “I have a 20-gauge pistol-grip shotgun. It’ll stop any book critic ever born.”

  I almost said the book critic might not be the worst of it, but I hadn’t told her about the deformed face glimpsed through the side window of the Maserati. Even I was beginning to think the ogre had been a figment of my imagination.

  “Viv, we have a source of guns,” Penny said. “We can get what we need. We’ll be okay.”

  “I imagine the source would be Grimbald and Clotilda. You better be careful going to them. Waxx might expect that.”

  Vivian wanted to hug each of us, and each of us wanted to hug her, which resulted in such a rustle and flutter of raincoats that the echoes in the exposed rafters sounded like a colony of bats awakening to the idea of their nightly flight.

  Vivian even picked up Lassie as if she were a mere Maltese and, holding her as she might cradle a baby, hugged the dog to her formidable bosom. “You folks … you’re the family I never could have. Anything happens to any one of you, I’m not going to feel like pink for maybe the rest of my life.”

  That declaration resulted in another round of even longer and noisier hugs, with Vivian still holding Lassie and the dog licking our chins as we embraced with her between us. But at last we boarded the Mercury Mountaineer.

  After pressing the switch to raise the garage door, Vivian returned to the driver’s window of the SUV, tears pooled in her eyes. “Remember, if you get a different disposable phone, you call me right away with the number.”

  “I will. Right away.”

  First thing in the morning, she intended to buy a disposable of her own and call me with the number. We were taking the kind of precautions common to clandestine cells of revolutionaries.

  We loved Vivian almost from the day we met her, but Penny and Milo and I were more emotional at this parting than any of us could have anticipated.