Джонатан Келлерман - Night Moves

After that, trip the flimsy lock and defile thy neighbor.

Why the Corvins?

Maybe because there’s nothing like years of proximity to breed resentment.

Rosy idealists like to think throwing people together breeds tolerance and goodwill, but often it accomplishes just the opposite. The Corvins hadn’t cited any conflict with Bitt, just curt rebuffs. But who knew how he felt?

Hostility grew deep roots in a certain type of psyche. Sometimes it didn’t take much to trigger action.

The TV next door playing too loudly.

The kids fighting noisily.

Or, if I was right about Chet being the target, it could simply boil down to too many obnoxious comments by a blowhard with the capacity to irritate a saint.

Chet ridicules, Bitt says nothing. Chet keeps going, Bitt stews. Imagines. Plots.

One of the quiet ones.

His landscaping, all that stay-away flora. What if he kept the world at bay because he had a lot to hide? Unhealthy appetites, a grotesquely violent fantasy life that had spilled over to murder?

On the other hand, Trevor Bitt might be an artist who craved isolation in order to ply his talents. Or just a guy who enjoyed his privacy.

I’d research him tomorrow. After I figured out what to tell Robin. Meanwhile, drive and try not to think about the horror in Chet Corvin’s den.

I put the radio on, already tuned to KJazz. Lucked out and got the first few bars of Stan Getz playing “Samba Triste,” one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever recorded.

That helped but only until the song ended. Then came a bunch of public-service announcements and I started to feel human again.

In the early-morning hours, crossing from the Palisades into Brentwood, not a pleasant sensation.

Robin had activated the alarm. I switched off, rearmed, took off my shoes, and padded to the bedroom.

She was curled up under the covers. I went into the kitchen, thought about a body without face or hands, and filled a glass with tap water.

A high-pitched peep issued from the utility room.

Blanche, our little blond French bulldog, greeting me from her crate.

We leave the door ajar but she never pushes it open. Well trained, we congratulate ourselves. But I’ve always suspected she likes the privilege of us tending to her in the morning, extending a formal invitation to greet the day.

She looked comfortable enough, now, a rotund sausage of honey-colored fur topped by an oversized, knobby head. One eye shut, the other cocked open. I reached in and petted her. She purred, let loose several glorious farts, did that smiling thing of hers, yawned, curled her tongue, and extended a paw. When I took it, she licked my hand and studied me with a single, soft brown eye.

“Need something, cutie?”

She cyclops-stared at me. You’re the one with needs, buster.

I rubbed behind her ears. She stretched and fell back asleep.

Standing at the sink and drinking water, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been comforted.

When I slipped into bed, Robin drew the covers over her head and rubbed my foot with her size sixes.

Two hours later, she was still asleep and I was wide awake. At some point I must’ve slipped under, because I woke at eight, feeling as if I’d been tossed in a clothes dryer.

No one on the other side of the bed. The shower was running. Stripping naked, I stepped into the bathroom. Blanche lay on a mat, chewing a jerky stick. The shower stall was coated with fog, reducing Robin to shifting flits of bronze skin. She was singing, not loud enough for me to make out the words or the tune.

I drew a smiley face in the fog. She opened the door, drew me in. Soaping me up, she resumed her tune. “Whistle While You Work.”

Garbed and clean, we sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and eating toast while Blanche continued to erode her jerky.

Despite the shower, I’d decided to run and was dressed for it. Robin, ready to finish up an archtop guitar for a jazz great, wore her shop uniform: black tee, blue overalls, red Keds. Snips of auburn curls restrained by a bandanna had come loose, endowing her with a halo.

“When did you get in, hon?”

“Around one thirty.”

“Didn’t hear a thing.” She nibbled crust, raised her mug with one hand, let the other land softly on the back of my neck.

I said, “You were out solid.”

She tickled the spot where hair met nape. “Complicated case?”

“Complicated and nasty.”

“Ah.”

“How much do you want to know?”

“As much as you want to tell me.”

Sounding like she meant it. Once upon a time how much I disclosed had been an issue. My protectiveness, her need to be taken seriously.

All that resolved, now. As far as I could see.

I decided to keep it sketchy. Ended up telling her everything.

She said, “Poor man. How do you go about identifying a victim like that?”

“Check the missing persons files, something unusual in the autopsy could help. If none of that works out, maybe the media. But even without an I.D., there’s already a person of interest. Your basic hostile loner living next door.”

“Scary guy?”

“All we’ve heard so far is surliness. He works at home, rarely emerges, doesn’t answer when spoken to.”

“Works at what?”

“Comic-book artist.”

She fiddled with her toast. “What’s his name?”

“Trevor Bitt.”

“ ‘Mr. Backwards.’ ”

“You know him?”

“I know his work,” she said. “My misspent youth. San Luis was even more conservative back then. Retired military, people working at the prison, small ranchers, blue-collar guys like my dad.”

I said, “You had a counterculture phase I never knew about?”

She grinned. “More like I tried to please everyone. I got decent grades, didn’t talk back to my parents, spent hours in Dad’s shop learning to work with wood, zipped my lip to avoid blowups with Mom. At the same time, I was part of an outsider group in school. We called ourselves the Creative Cult — no snickers, please.”

“God forbid.”

“God and me, darling. We were an artsy bunch of twits, did our share of weed, a few of the more daring souls got into heavier stuff — some of them ended up in the prison.”

“Rebels with a minor cause.”

“That’s giving too much credit. We were pretentious nerds pretending to buck authority. So when it came to music and art, the deeper underground, the better, and a big part of that was alternative comix. Crumb, the Hernandez brothers, Peter Bagge, and Trevor Bitt. He used to self-publish these pulpy little books that the first head shop in town carried. Mr. Backwards was his main character. Big body, small head, lecherously popping eyes, hairy hands shaped like this.”

She formed claws.

“Good-looking guy,” I said.

“Real Adonis. The main gag was that his head faced the opposite direction from his body, like someone had stitched him together the wrong way. As a result, he was always bumping into things.”

She rolled her eyes. “Bumping into people. Specifically their genitals.”

I said, “Convenient disability.”

“ ‘Oops, apologies, ma -damme. Well, hmm, er, I say, ma -damme, as long as we’ve ahem united our tantric forces, why don’t we con summate...’ ”

I laughed.

“Funny stuff,” she said. “Except when Mr. B happened to bump into his daughter. Or his mother. Or his grandmother.”

“Oh.”

“Über-creepy, Alex, and Bitt being so skillful as an artist heightened whatever reaction he was after, be it laughter or nausea. The boys in the group thought it was hilarious and rolled around like insane monkeys. The girls thought it was sick and tried to get the boys to stop reading Bitt. It caused a split, one reason we fell apart. But mostly, we disbanded because of short attention spans.”