Warren Murphy: Shock Value

He walked to the Peabody house feeling very tired.

Arlene Peabody was a tidy little birdlike woman with a bubble of bright red teased hair surrounding her face and making her look like a sunburned medicine ball. "I just don't understand it!" she shrieked with an ease that led Remo to believe that shrieking was the woman's mode of communication. "I mean, he was right here, right here on the couch in his pajamas watching "Masterpiece Theatre" one night, and the next morning he was gone. Poof. It was like he vanished." She burst into a torrent of hysterical laughter followed by a heavy flow of tears.

"It's all right, Mrs. Peabody," Remo said placatingly, patting her shoulder.

She threw off his arm with a wild gesture. "It's not all right! Everything's a mess. The kids won't go to school anymore. People keep telling them their father was a killer. I can't show my face in the supermarket. The house is always crawling with cops and CIA men and reporters, and now you."

"I was a friend of Orville's," Remo lied.

"You were?" The tears were still fresh in her eyes.

"And I don't think he put himself up to that business in Rome."

She leapt up from the couch. "That's what I've been telling everybody!" she screeched. "Never a word, nothing. Just poof, gone. No good-bye kiss, nothing. He didn't even take a clean shirt. Then three weeks later he shows up dead. On the front page of the newspaper!" She wailed like a banshee.

"Mrs. Peabody—"

"Now they're saying Orville was some kind of political terrorist or something."

"The man he killed was a terrorist."

"Oh, who cares?" she stormed. "Orville and I hardly ever watched the news. He wasn't interested in that stuff. Cub Scouts and mowing the lawn, that was all Orville cared about. Cub Scouts. Is that a hobby for a killer? I tell you, he couldn't have done it."

"A hundred people saw him do it."

"I don't care. It must have been one of those clones or something."

"Oh, come on...."

"Don't say it's not possible," she screamed. "I've got African violets that are cloned."

"I really don't think your husband was a clone," Remo said with as straight a face as possible.

"Then how'd he get to Italy? We have exactly six hundred and twenty-seven dollars in our savings account. It wasn't touched. Even if he'd taken out every cent, it wouldn't have been enough to fly over to Italy."

"He went by way of Newfoundland."

She looked puzzled. "Where's that?"

"Off the coast of Canada."

"That's stupid," Mrs. Peabody said. "Why would he fly to Canada to get to Italy?"

Remo shrugged. "Beats me."

"It wasn't him, I tell you."

"I've got a picture." He pulled out the photograph. It was a good clear shot that captured Peabody during the moment between his act of violence and his death at the hands of the angry mob. The man's face was radiant and unafraid, his eyes smiling with satisfaction.

Mrs. Peabody gasped and lunged for it. "This isn't Orville!" she shouted.

Remo looked at the photograph, alarmed. "Didn't you identify the body at the morgue?"

"Yes, but that was a clone, too. Look." She dashed around the room like a mad thing, picking photographs off the mantle and the end tables. She threw them at Remo. "See for yourself."

He studied them one at a time, comparing them with Smith's picture of the assassin. They were different, all right. The features were identical, but the bland, forgettable expressions on the faces in Mrs. Peabody's pictures of her husband bore no resemblance to the transfixed, almost mystical look of ecstasy in the photograph Remo had brought with him.

"He looks— I don't know— healthier or something in the new one," Remo said.

Mrs. Peabody made sputtering noises like a chicken gagging. "It was a clone, I tell you."

"Mrs. Peabody..."

"I know my husband's face. He didn't smile, for one thing. He said it gave him indigestion. And he didn't like the sun."

Remo looked up from the pictures. "What did you say?"

"He didn't like sun." She stared at him. "The clone has a suntan."

Remo slapped his forehead. Of course! That was the difference in the pictures. Mrs. Peabody's visual records of her husband showed a man who was not only sullen and lackluster, but pale as the underside of a trout. The "new" Peabody, however, the man who looked as if he was ready to pass out cigars after killing a man in cold blood, was dark. As dark as if he'd spent weeks in the sun.

"Now do you believe he was cloned?"

"I don't know what to believe," Remo said.

She sat down heavily. "At least you're honest," she said. "It's just too weird. But other things have been weird around here."

"Like what?"

"Like this Abraxas stuff," she said wearily. "That was what Orville was supposed to have said before he... before he..."

"I know. And?"

"And so that's probably why I keep thinking about it. I mean, the CIA was so interested in it and everything. They kept asking me what I knew about it."

"What'd you tell them?"

"Nothing. I don't even know what it means. Orville certainly never said anything about it. As far as I'm concerned, it's just some weird name. Only..." She looked at Remo through wide, frightened eyes.

"Only what?"

She looked away. "Oh, forget it. Maybe I'm losing my mind. I'm a housewife, you see." She whispered it as if it were a confession. "I've got problems coping, you know? I eat Valiums like M&M's. They probably softened my brain. I read somewhere that can happen."

"Only what, Mrs. Peabody?"

"I told my neighbor, and she laughed at me."

"I won't laugh," Remo said. He waited.

"Promise?"

"Promise."

"Well, okay." She looked at him sideways, suspiciously. "I knew the name before it was ever in the papers."

Remo felt the air press out of his lungs. "You mean Abraxas?" he asked softly.

She nodded. "It started happening right after Orville disappeared. This funny name would be swimming around in my head. You know, like a radio commercial that follows you around all day? That's what it's like. 'Abraxas, Abraxas, Abraxas,' " she droned. "I can see the word plain as day in front of my face right now. Oh, it's just weird."

Remo's face had drained of color. "Go on," he said woodenly.

"Don't you think I'm crazy?"

"No," Remo said.

"All right. The other night I was tucking my kids in bed as usual. It had been a really rough day, what with all the police and the CIA guys and the neighborhood hecklers and the newsmen and photographers and everything. I had to go to the morgue that day, too. It was awful."

"What happened, Mrs. Peabody?" Remo said impatiently.

"Well, it was just so rotten, I guess I went to pieces after dinner. I cried my eyes out, thinking about all kinds of things. Then I went up to kiss the boys good night. My youngest son was already asleep, but Timmy, my ten-year-old, was waiting up for me. He told me not to cry." Mrs. Peabody stared straight ahead, as if in a trance. "He said, 'Mommy, don't cry. Abraxas is going to make it all better.' That was the weirdest part of all."

Remo stood up. "I'd better go."

"You don't believe me, do you?"

"I told you I did," Remo said. "You're not crazy. You and your son aren't the only people who've seen that hallucination."

"It's not a hallucination!" she shrieked. "Abraxas is a name. He's somebody, a person. I tell you he cloned Orville, and God only knows what he's going to do to the rest of us."

"I'll check it out," Remo said.

The lady was nutty as a fruitcake. Still, something in her words made Remo shiver.

What, he asked himself on his way back to the motel. That the strange name, Abraxas, sprouting simultaneously in the minds of three people, belonged to a real person? Crazy. Simply crazy. It just wasn't possible.