Prodigal Son Read online

  Behind the theater, a bare bulb in a wire cage above the back door shed light as drab and gray as this litter-strewn alleyway.

  Sporting multiple layers of cracked and chipped paint, the door was a scab in the brick wall. Deucalion studied the latch, the lock…and decided to use the bell.

  He pushed the button, and a loud buzz vibrated through the door. Inside the quiet theater, it must have echoed like a fire alarm.

  Moments later, he heard heavy movement inside. He sensed that he was being studied through the fish-eye security lens.

  The lock rattled, and the door opened to reveal a sweet face and merry eyes peering out of a prison of flesh. At five feet seven and perhaps three hundred pounds, this guy was twice the man he should have been.

  “Are you Jelly Biggs?” Deucalion asked.

  “Do I look like I’m not?”

  “You’re not fat enough.”

  “When I was a star in the ten-in-one, I weighed almost three hundred more. I’m half the man I used to be.”

  “Ben sent for me. I’m Deucalion.”

  “Yeah, I figured. In the old days, a face like yours was gold in the carnival.”

  “We’re both blessed, aren’t we?”

  Stepping back, motioning Deucalion to enter, Biggs said, “Ben told me a lot about you. He didn’t mention the tattoo.”

  “It’s new.”

  “They’re fashionable these days,” said Jelly Biggs.

  Deucalion stepped across the threshold into a wide but shabby hallway. “And me,” he said drily, “I’ve always been a fashion plate.”

  BEHIND THE BIG theater screen, the Luxe featured a labyrinth of passages, storage closets, and rooms that no patron had ever visited. With a rolling gait and heavy respiration, Jelly led the way past crates, mildewed cardboard boxes, and moisture-curled posters and stand-ups that promoted old films.

  “Ben put seven names on the letter he sent me,” Deucalion said.

  “You once mentioned Rombuk monastery, so he figured you might still be there, but he didn’t know what name you’d be using.”

  “He shouldn’t have shared my names.”

  “Just knowin’ your aliases doesn’t mean I can mojo you.”

  They arrived at a door that wore an armor-thick coat of green paint. Biggs opened it, switched on a light, gestured for Deucalion to enter ahead of him.

  A windowless but cozy apartment lay beyond. A kitchenette was adjacent to the combination bedroom and living room. Ben loved books, and two walls were lined with them.

  Jelly Biggs said, “It’s a sweet place you inherited.”

  The key word whipped through Deucalion’s mind before lashing back with a sharp sting. “Inherited. What do you mean? Where’s Ben?”

  Jelly looked surprised. “You didn’t get my letter?”

  “Only his.”

  Jelly sat on one of the chrome and red-vinyl chairs at the dinette table. It creaked. “Ben was mugged.”

  The world is an ocean of pain. Deucalion felt the old familiar tide wash through him.

  “This isn’t the best part of town, and getting worse,” Biggs said. “Ben bought the Luxe when he retired from the carnival. The neighborhood was supposed to be turning around. It didn’t. The place would be hard to sell these days, so Ben wanted to hold on.”

  “How did it happen?” Deucalion asked.

  “Stabbed. More than twenty times.”

  Anger, like a long-repressed hunger, rose in Deucalion. Once anger had been his meat, and feasting on it, he had starved.

  If he let this anger grow, it would quickly become fury—and devour him. For decades he had kept this lightning in a bottle, securely stoppered, but now he longed to pull the cork.

  And then…what? Become the monster again? Pursued by mobs with torches, with pitchforks and guns, running, running, running with hounds baying for his blood?

  “He was everybody’s second father,” said Jelly Biggs. “Best damn carnie boss I ever knew.”

  During the past two centuries, Ben Jonas had been one of a precious handful of people with whom Deucalion had shared his true origins, one of the few he had ever trusted completely.

  He said, “He was murdered after he contacted me.”

  Biggs frowned. “You say that like there’s a connection.”

  “Did they ever find the killer?”

  “No. That’s not unusual. The letter to you, the mugging—just a coincidence.”

  At last putting down his suitcase, Deucalion said, “There are no coincidences.”

  Jelly Biggs looked up from the dinette chair and met Deucalion’s eyes. Without a word they understood that in addition to years in the carnival, they shared a view of the world that was as rich with meaning as with mysteries.

  Pointing toward the kitchenette, the fat man said, “Besides the theater, Ben left you sixty thousand cash. It’s in the freezer.”

  Deucalion considered this revelation for a moment, then said, “He didn’t trust many people.”

  Jelly shrugged. “What do I need with money when I’ve got such good looks?”

  CHAPTER 9

  SHE WAS YOUNG, poor, inexperienced. She’d never had a manicure before, and Roy Pribeaux proposed that he give her one.

  “I give myself manicures,” he said. “A manicure can be erotic, you know. Just give me a chance. You’ll see.”

  Roy lived in a large loft apartment, the top half of a remodeled old building in the Warehouse District. Many rundown structures in this part of the city had been transformed into expansive apartments for artists.

  A printing company and a computer-assembly business shared the main floor below. They existed in another universe, as far as Roy Pribeaux was concerned; he didn’t bother them, and they reciprocated.

  He needed his privacy, especially when he took a new and special woman to his loft. This time, her name was Elizabeth Lavenza.

  As odd as it might seem on a first date—or a tenth, for that matter—to suggest a manicure, he had charmed Elizabeth into it. He knew well that the modern woman responded to sensitivity in men.

  First, at the kitchen table, he placed her fingers in a shallow bowl of warm oil to soften both the nails and the cuticles.

  Most women also liked men who enjoyed pampering them, and young Elizabeth was no different in this regard.

  In addition to sensitivity and a desire to pamper, Roy had a trove of amusing stories and could keep a girl laughing. Elizabeth had a lovely laugh. Poor thing, she had no chance of resisting him.

  When her fingertips had soaked long enough, he wiped them with a soft towel.

  Using a natural, nonacetone polish remover, he stripped the red color from her nails. Then with gentle strokes of an emery board, he sculpted the tip of each nail into a perfect curve.

  He had only begun to trim the cuticles when an embarrassing thing happened: His special cell phone rang, and he knew that the caller had to be Candace. Here he was romancing Elizabeth, and the other woman in his life was calling.

  He excused himself and hurried into the dining area, where he had left the phone on a table. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Darnell?”

  “I know that lovely voice,” he said softly, moving into the living room, away from Elizabeth. “Is this Candace?”

  The cotton-candy vendor laughed nervously. “We talked so little, how could you recognize my voice?”

  Standing at one of the tall windows, his back to the kitchen, he said, “Don’t you recognize mine?”

  He could almost feel the heat of her blush coming down the line when she admitted, “Yes, I do.”

  “I’m so glad you called,” he said in a discreet murmur.

  Shyly, she said, “Well, I thought…maybe coffee?”

  “A get-acquainted coffee. Just say where and when.”

  He hoped she didn’t mean right now. Elizabeth was waiting, and he was enjoying giving her the manicure.

  “Tomorrow evening?” Candace suggested. “Usually business on the boardwalk dies down af
ter eight o’clock.”

  “Meet you at the red wagon. I’ll be the guy with the big smile.”

  Unskilled at romance, she said awkwardly, “And…I guess I’ll be the one with the eyes.”

  “You sure will,” he said. “Such eyes.”

  Roy pressed END. The disposable phone wasn’t registered to him. Out of habit, he wiped it clean of prints, tossed it on the sofa.

  His modern, austere apartment didn’t contain much furniture. His exercise machines were his pride. On the walls were reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches, the great man’s studies of the perfect human form.

  Returning to Elizabeth at the kitchen table, Roy said, “My sister. We talk all the time. We’re very close.”

  When the manicure was complete, he exfoliated the skin of her perfect hands with an aromatic mixture of almond oil, sea salt, and essence of lavender (his own concoction), which he massaged onto her palms, the backs of the hands, the knuckles, the fingers.

  Finally, he rinsed each hand, wrapped it in clean white butcher paper, and sealed it in a plastic bag. As he placed the hands in the freezer, he said, “I’m so happy you’ve come to stay, Elizabeth.”

  He didn’t find it peculiar to be talking to her severed hands. Her hands had been the essence of her. Nothing else of Elizabeth Lavenza had been worth talking about or to. The hands were her.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE LUXE WAS an ornate Deco palace, glamorous in its day, a fit showcase for the movies of William Powell and Myrna Loy, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman. Like many a Hollywood face, this glamour had peeled and sagged.

  Deucalion accompanied Jelly Biggs down the center aisle, past rows of musty, patched seats.

  “Damn DVDs screwed the revival business,” Jelly said. “Ben’s retirement didn’t turn out like he expected.”

  “Marquee says you’re still open Thursday through Sunday.”

  “Not since Ben died. There’s almost enough thirty-five-millimeter fanatics to make it worthwhile. But some weekends we run up more expenses than receipts. I didn’t want to take responsibility for that since it’s become your property.”

  Deucalion looked up at the screen. The gold and crimson velvet curtains drooped, heavy with dust and creeping mildew. “So…you left the carnival when Ben did?”

  “When freak shows took a fade, Ben made me theater manager. I got my own apartment here. I hope that won’t change…assuming you want to keep the place running.”

  Deucalion pointed to a quarter on the floor. “Finding money is always a sign.”

  “A sign of what?”

  Stooping to pick up the quarter, Deucalion said, “Heads, you’re out of a job. Tails, you’re out of a job.”

  “Don’t like them odds.”

  Deucalion snapped the coin into the air, snatched it in midflight. When he opened his fist, the coin had disappeared.

  “Neither heads nor tails. A sign for sure, don’t you think?”

  Instead of relief at having kept his job and home, Jelly’s expression was troubled. “I been having a dream about a magician. He’s strangely gifted.”

  “Just a simple trick.”

  Jelly said, “I’m maybe a little psychic. My dreams sometimes come sorta true.”

  Deucalion had much he could have said to that, but he remained silent, waiting.

  Jelly looked at the moldering drapes, at the threadbare carpet, at the elaborate ceiling, everywhere but at Deucalion. At last he said, “Ben told me some about you, things that don’t seem they could be real.” He finally met Deucalion’s eyes. “Do you have two hearts?”

  Deucalion chose not to reply.

  “In the dream,” Jelly said, “the magician had two hearts…and he was stabbed in both.”

  A flutter of wings overhead drew Deucalion’s attention.

  “Bird got in yesterday,” Jelly said. “A dove, by the look of it. Haven’t been able to chase it out.”

  Deucalion tracked the trapped bird’s flight. He knew how it felt.

  CHAPTER 11

  CARSON LIVED ON A tree-lined street in a house nondescript except for a gingerbread veranda that wrapped three sides.

  She parked at the curb because the garage was packed with her parents’ belongings, which she never found time to sort through.

  On her way to the kitchen door, she paused under an oak draped with Spanish moss. Her work hardened her, wound her tight. Arnie, her brother, needed a gentle sister. Sometimes she couldn’t decompress during the walk from car to house; she required a moment to herself.

  Here in the humid night and the fragrance of jasmine, she found that she couldn’t shift into domestic gear. Her nerves were twisted as tight as dreadlocks, and her mind raced. As never before, the scent of jasmine reminded her of the smell of blood.

  The recent killings had been so gruesome and had occurred in such rapid succession that she could not put them aside during her personal time. Under normal circumstances, she was seventy percent cop, thirty percent woman and sister; these days, she was all cop, twenty-four/seven.

  When Carson entered the kitchen, Vicky Chou had just loaded the dishwasher and switched it on. “Well, I screwed up.”

  “Don’t tell me you put laundry in the dishwasher.”

  “Worse. With his brisket of beef, I gave him carrots and peas.”

  “Oh, never orange and green on the same plate, Vicky.”

  Vicky sighed. “He’s got more rules about food than kosher and vegan combined.”

  On a cop’s salary, Carson could not have afforded a live-in caregiver to look after her autistic brother. Vicky took the job in return for room and board—and out of gratitude.

  When Vicky’s sister, Liane, had been indicted with her boyfriend and two others for conspiracy to commit murder, she seemed helplessly snared in a web of evidence. She’d been innocent. In the process of sending the other three to prison, Carson had cleared Liane.

  As a successful medical transcriptionist, Vicky worked flexible hours at home, transcribing micro-cassettes for physicians. If Arnie had been a more demanding autistic, Vicky might not have been able to keep up with her work, but the boy was mostly quiescent.

  Widowed at forty, now forty-five, Vicky was an Asian beauty, smart and sweet and lonely. She wouldn’t grieve forever. Someday when she least expected it, a man would come into her life, and the current arrangement would end.

  Carson dealt with that possibility the only way that her busy life allowed: She ignored it.

  “Other than green and orange together, how was he today?” Carson asked.

  “Fixated on the castle. Sometimes it seems to calm him, but at other times…” Vicky frowned. “What is he so afraid of?”

  “I don’t know. I guess…life.”

  BY REMOVING A WALL and combining two of the upstairs bedrooms, Carson had given Arnie the largest room in the house. This seemed only fair because his condition stole from him the rest of the world.

  His bed and nightstand were shoved into a corner. A TV occupied a wheeled metal stand. Sometimes he watched cartoons on DVD, the same ones over and over.

  The remainder of the room had been devoted to the castle.

  Four low sturdy tables formed a twelve-by-eight-foot platform. Upon the tables stood an architectural wonder in Lego blocks.

  Few boys of twelve would have been able to create a model castle without a plan, but Arnie had put together a masterpiece: walls and wards, barbicon and bastions, ramparts and parapets, turreted towers, the barracks, the chapel, the armory, the castle keep with elaborate bulwark and battlements.

  He’d been obsessed with the model for weeks, constructing it in an intense silence. Repeatedly he tore down finished sections only to remodel and improve them.

  Most of the time he was on his feet while adding to the castle—an access hole in the table arrangement allowed him to build from within the project as well as from every side—but sometimes, like now, he worked while sitting on a wheeled stool. Carson rolled a second stool to t
he table and sat to watch.

  He was a dark-haired, blue-eyed boy whose looks alone would have ensured him a favored place in the world if he’d not been autistic.

  At times like this, when his concentration on a task was total, Arnie would not tolerate anyone being too near to him. If Carson drew closer than four or five feet, he would grow agitated.

  When enthralled by a project, he might pass days in silence except for wordless reactions to any attempt to interrupt his work or to invade his personal space.

  More than eighteen years separated Carson from Arnie. He’d been born the year that she moved out of her parents’ house. Even if he’d been spared from autism, they would not have been as close as many brothers and sisters, for they would have shared so few experiences.

  Following the death of their parents four years ago, Carson gained custody of her brother. He had been with her ever since.

  For reasons that she could not fully articulate, Carson had come to love this gentle, withdrawn child. She didn’t think she could have loved him more if he had been her son rather than her brother.

  She hoped that someday there would be a breakthrough either in the treatment of autism in general or in Arnie’s particular case. But she knew her hope had little chance of being fulfilled.

  Now she pondered the most recent changes he had made to the outer curtain wall of the castle compound. He had fortified it with regularly spaced buttresses that doubled as steep flights of stairs by which defenders could reach the walkways behind the battlements.

  Recently Arnie had seemed to be more fearful than usual. Carson could not shake the feeling that he sensed some trouble coming and that he was urgently determined to prepare for it. He could not build a real castle, so he took refuge in this fantasy of a fortress home.

  CHAPTER 12

  RANDAL SIX CROSSES SPHINX with XENOPHOBE, finishing the last crossword puzzle in the book.

  Other collections of puzzles await him. But with the completion of this current book, he is armored against the fearsome disorder of the world. He has earned protection.