Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

When he saw the contorted figure in the red bikini briefs lying in full rigor mortis on the living room couch, Simon was surprised at its savaged condition-he couldn’t remember having inflicted that much damage. He hurried past it into the guest bedroom. No bodies here, and no American Moderne-just a single bed, a garage-sale dresser, and a few amateurish still lifes on the walls.

So this austere little maid’s room was where the real Skairdykat had slept, according to Gloria. And this little closet of a bathroom was where she had showered. And her name is Linda, and now she lives with Pender. Which means another first for the game: a doubleheader. How convenient, thought Simon. How very…bloody…convenient.

“Not bad for a one-armed old fat man,” declared an exultant, if exhausted, Pender, after a morning of extended lovemaking punctuated by endorphin-drenched naps.

“One-eyed,” Dorie murmured, equally satisfied, but less inclined to crow about it. She did think it was sort of sweet, how boyishly proud Pender was to have collaborated with her on that last, noisy multiple O.

“Hunh?”

“One- eyed old fat man-it’s a line from True Grit.”

Pender shuddered-small wonder he’d misremembered the quote: the thought of losing even one eye filled him with horror. Once that happened, he knew, you were only a sharpened pencil away from total blindness.

Linda called back while Dorie was in the shower. “Nelson Carpenter,” she announced.

Pender checked his watch. “Just a little over three hours-couldn’t have done better myself. I don’t suppose you also came up with a current address?”

“You know where Concord is?”

“Massachusetts.”

“Concord, California. North of San Francisco-Contra Costa County, I think. The subdivision’s named Rancho del Vista.”

“Just give me the street address; I’ll find it.”

Here we go again, thought Linda. “Ed, sooner or later, McDougal is gonna-”

“-be very, very proud of his little Liaison Support Unit. But I give you my word of honor, if Nervous Nellie has anything at all to tell us about Childs’s whereabouts, I will pass the information along to the appropriate authorities.”

Linda gave him the address, reminded him of his promise, and wished him luck; it wasn’t until another hour had passed that she realized their agreement could have been more precisely worded. She called him back and got his message box.

“Ed, this is Linda. Just to clarify: the term ‘appropriate authorities’ does not, repeat not, include yourself. Talk to you soon.”

“How far is Concord?” Pender called through the bathroom door, when Dorie had finished her shower.

“Two, three hours. Depends on the traffic and the time of day. You can pretty much bypass San Fran and Oakland entirely, if you swing around on six-eighty. Why?”

“That’s where Nervous Nellie lives.”

“All right! We should probably leave now, avoid both commutes.”

“Whoa. To paraphrase Tonto, what you mean ‘we,’ white woman?”

“What you mean, what I mean?” Dorie came out wrapped in a bath towel, winding a second towel around her wet hair. “You’re not leaving me alone here, buster.”

“Luka practically tore me a new one for bringing you along yesterday. Said I could be doing you untold psychological damage.”

“In the first place: you didn’t bring me, I brought you. In the second place: Luka is at least ninety, and rumor has it he takes LSD once a month. In the third place: the psychological damage has already been done-by Simon. I dream about him, I imagine him popping up every time I turn a corner, and if you’re not in the room with me, I can’t even bring myself to look at the window, in case his face pops up there. In the fourth place: you’re the one who keeps saying he’s probably within driving distance of Berkeley, and in case you’ve forgotten, this house, my home, which he’s already invaded once, is very much within driving distance. Is that enough places for you yet? ’Cause if it’s not, I can come up with a whole lot more.”

He raised both hands, palms out. “Okay, okay, I surrender.” But half an hour later he sneaked out of the house via the studio door while Dorie was on the phone with one of her girlfriends-better to ask forgiveness than permission was as effective a strategy with women as it was with the Bureau.

Some women, anyway: when Pender reached the driveway, he stuck his hand into his pants pocket for his keys and came up empty. He told himself they must have fallen out of his pocket when he took his pants off last night. As he tiptoed into the house and past the kitchen on his way up to the bedroom, though, Pender heard a familiar jingling sound and backed up to see Dorie seated at the kitchen table, telephone in one hand, his key ring dangling from the thumb and forefinger of the other.

“Be with you in a minute there, Lone Ranger,” she said, and jingled the keys merrily again.

Just as well, thought Pender-he’d forgotten that he couldn’t work the damn shift anyway.

Conventional wisdom would argue that Simon Childs’s use of powerful pharmaceuticals, on top of all the other stress he was under, could only have served to accelerate the inevitable deterioration of an already unstable personality.

Simon would have disagreed-and a case could well be made that the serotonin-reuptake-inhibiting effects of 3,4-methylene-dioxy-N-methylamphetamine, also known as MDMA, Adam, or Ecstasy, in addition to the weed and the Percodan, were indeed having a pacifying effect on him.

But Simon was no pharmacologist. All he knew was that he’d stepped into the little stall shower in the guest bathroom half a jump ahead of the blind rat, and emerged feeling as giddy as a schoolboy and so full of fellow-feeling that on his way upstairs, he took the time to rearrange the body on the chrome and leather couch into as comfortable a position as rigor mortis would allow and cover it with a striped Hudson’s Bay blanket from the spare bedroom.

Simon was feeling so mellow, in fact, that upon his return to the bedroom, before sitting down at the vanity to roll another doob, he removed the sheet he’d draped over the mirror earlier, and played a quick round of Senor Wences-”S’awright? S’awright! S’okay? S’okay!”-with Grandfather Childs.

That was pushing it, though: once the joint-a better effort than the last one-was rolled, tempting as it would have been to watch his grandfather toke up, Simon turned his back on the old man. He took a deep drag-his glance fell upon the canvas travel bag on the floor next to him. He unzipped it a few inches to peek in on the king and the coral, sleeping peacefully in the bottom, entwined in each other’s arms like an old married couple.

“Except you don’t have any arms, do you?” giggled Simon, zipping the bag, then unzipping it again. “S’awright…?” “S’awright!” he called in two different voices.

But why this sudden obsession with Senor Wences? he asked himself. Hadn’t thought of the old ventriloquist from the Ed Sullivan Show in years, and now he was practically channeling him. Eventually it came to him: he missed his sister. Missy had been so taken with Senor Wences that she’d spent most of 1959 with a little face painted on the thumb side of her fist. “Eassy for you, deefeecul’ for meee,” she used to croon to her hand. Not that anybody but me ever understood her, Simon thought sadly.

But it was a good sadness, a sweet, loving sadness welling up inside him, filling the emptiness like a big warm golden marshmallow. Then he caught a blur of movement in his lower peripheral vision and looked down in time to see a banded snake slithering out of the canvas bag-God bless it, he’d left it slightly open. A second serpentine head emerged from the bag, testing the air with its tongue. This second snout was black, thank goodness-Simon snatched up a hairbrush and forced the coral back into the bag.