Fear itself: a novel (6 page)

“Hello?…Oh, hi, Dorie, what’s—…Oh, no. Oh, no…Listen, Dor’, I want to take this in the other room…. Yeah, no sense getting the kid all upset.” He handed the phone to Missy. “I’m gonna take it in my room—would you hang this up for me?”

And she did. Simon raised his hand as if he were going to strike her; then his mustache twitched; then he laughed. “I meant after I picked up the other phone.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” Missy said coolly, without taking her eyes off the television screen, where Cary Grant (who with his silver hair and dimpled chin looked a lot like Simon, at least to Missy’s eyes) was sliding,
clackety-clackety-clackety-clack,
down Audrey Hepburn’s slippery, steeply sloped tile roof.

Simon, who’d been up since well before dawn—he’d driven to San Francisco and back to drop off the note and cello case at Ocean Beach, then worked like a galley slave all morning—still hadn’t decided what to do with the birds when Missy summoned him up from the basement to take Dorie’s call.

And while this afternoon’s news update from the troublesome Ms. Bell wasn’t entirely bad—according to the FBI agent she’d been in touch with, apparently SFPD had bought the suicide note, hook, line, and sinker—it was alarming to learn that she’d gotten the FBI involved in the first place. Simon would have to accelerate his timetable—a road trip was definitely in order.

But he couldn’t leave Missy alone, and he’d given her attendant the week off in order to have more privacy with Wayne. Now he’d have to get Tasha back, but before he could do that, he’d have to do something about the birds in the basement. All on three hours of sleep. Busy, busy, busy, but at least he wasn’t bored. That was the important thing—Simon had never encountered anyone who suffered from boredom to the extent he did, with the possible exception of Grandfather Childs, who’d known it well enough to have given it its name: the blind rat.

Only, the way Simon pictured it as a boy, it was more like a grub, a fat, blind, hairless grub gnawing away at him from the inside, robbing him of his peace, of his rest, and if he went too long without sufficient stimulation, of his sanity.

But with another session of the fear game to look forward to in the near future, the blind rat was not likely to be an immediate problem. And this game would be an easy one to prepare for: all he needed, really, was some Rohypnol, with which he was already well supplied, and a few masks, which shouldn’t be all that difficult to procure, Simon reminded himself, not with Halloween less than two weeks away.

They got him. They got him good.

First they tortured him a little. No congratulatory messages at work Monday, no retirement luncheon, no gold watch.

But Pender had been determined not to let it get to him. On his way home he stopped at the strip mall in Potomac and picked up videos of
Guadalcanal Diary, The Sands of Iwo Jima,
and
The Best of Mimi Miyagi,
enough Chinese takeout to feed the Red Army, and to wash it down, a fifth of Jim Beam. He’d left the pint behind in Abruzzi’s desk drawer. She’d insisted she didn’t drink, but Pender suspected it would only be a matter of time.

Since his divorce ten years earlier, Pender had been living in a ramshackle house on a hillside above Tinsman’s Lock, Lock 22 of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, on federal land originally ground-deeded to former slaves after the Civil War and held now by Pender on a grandfathered National Park Service lease.

Among the advantages of living at Tinsman’s Lock: a heavily wooded lot, no neighbors, and gorgeous views of the C&O, the Potomac, and the Virginia countryside beyond; it was also cheap. But chief among the disadvantages was the reason it was cheap: according to the terms of the lease, all visible improvements beyond the existing underground power and phone lines had to be period—any time between 1850 and 1890 would do—and not many people, it seemed, were willing to pay Montgomery County prices for a Tobacco Road home.

As for the interior, in the ten years Pender had lived there, more than one woman had tried her hand at decorating, but none of them had lasted long enough to make much of a dent, domesticity-wise. As his old friend Sid Dolitz once observed, the house was a lot like Pender himself: big, homely, and getting more dilapidated with every passing year.

So after convincing himself that he hadn’t wanted a damn party anyway, Pender had spent the first evening of his retirement watching videos, pigging down Chinese, and practicing his putting out on the spacious, if rickety, back porch, in preparation for his retirement present from Sid: a trip to California, two days of golf at Pebble Beach, two nights at the Lodge.

By Tuesday morning, a surprise party was the last thing on Pender’s mind. He slept until ten, drowned his hangover with the hair of the dog (and why not?—he wasn’t working), had leftover Chinese for brunch, and drove off in his jet black pride and joy, a ’64 Barracuda he’d rescued from an abusive living situation and restored to health while drying out after his divorce, to meet Sid Dolitz at Sid’s country club for their veddy civilized one o’clock tee time.

In many ways, Dolitz was the anti-Pender. Short, slight, a connoisseur of good food and fine wines, a faithful and uxorious husband to his beloved and extremely wealthy Esther until death did them part, and something of a dandy, at least by Bureau standards (even back in the FBI’s mandatory conservative-suit-white-shirt-and-tie days, his suits were natural shoulder, his shirts were Egyptian sharkskin, and his Countess Mara neckties were always accessorized with a complementary pocket handkerchief), Sid had been playing a somewhat bemused Felix to Pender’s Oscar for over twenty years.

Today he was wearing a pale green poplin windbreaker and perfectly creased khakis with a one-inch cuff; his iron gray toupee was unruffled by the fresh autumn breeze.

“Five bucks a hole,” he called as Pender stepped up to the first tee.

“Ten,” replied Pender, who then duck-hooked his first drive into the dogwoods to the left of the fairway.

Although Sid was ten years older than Pender, he preferred walking the course—possibly because he understood that the more tired Pender’s legs became, the worse he hooked his drives. Once again, Pender barely shot his temperature. He paid up at the nineteenth hole; Sid left the money on the bar, and several rounds later, he insisted on leaving his own car at the club and driving Pender home in the ’Cuda.

Not a particularly subtle ruse: afterward, it occurred to Pender that if he hadn’t suspected anything by the time he dragged his golf bag through the front door—at which point the thirty or forty people crowded into the vestibule or overflowing into the living room jumped out at him (those still young enough to jump) and shouted “Surprise!” at the top of their lungs—he probably
had
been too drunk to drive.

He had to fight back the tears as they crowded around him. “You got me,” he kept saying. “You got me good.”

September and October were what they called locals’ weather on the Monterey Peninsula. Not only did the tourists clear out after Labor Day, but so did the fog—if the winter rains held off, you could generally count on two months of sunshine.

Dorie had been too shaken by the news of Wayne’s death to get any work done Tuesday. Eventually, she knew, she’d end up painting it out, putting the fear and the grief, the whole mourning process, into one of her plein air scenes—just not during locals’ weather.

But when she walked down to Carmel Beach around six o’clock that evening, Dorie found herself wishing she’d brought her gear. You don’t need rain for mourning, she thought: a Carmel Bay sunset will do very nicely. There’s sadness in so much beauty, especially when it’s over so quickly. Then she remembered that Wayne Summers was only twenty-seven when he died.

Twenty-seven! And he was healthy, he had a job he loved and his career was flourishing; he was as close to taking charge of his ornithophobia as he’d ever been; and as if all that weren’t reason enough to live, he got laid a lot more often than Dorie did, usually by breathtakingly gorgeous men—what possible reason would he have had to kill himself? Drown himself, at that. Wayne couldn’t swim a lick. Dorie remembered how he used to joke that it was one of only three black stereotypes that could be applied to him. The other two, he added, were a good sense of rhythm and none-of-your-business.

Dorie found herself laughing through her tears at the memory. But after the tears came anger, and a resolution: She would not give up. She would keep trying, she would redouble her efforts, she would make a pest of herself at every level of law enforcement, until she had convinced somebody to open an investigation, and keep it open. Somebody like this female FBI agent. Because even if Abruzzi didn’t believe what Dorie was saying yet, at least she sounded as if she
wanted
to believe. That was something, anyway.

Froot Loops, thought Linda—the Maryland countryside was in full autumn riot, yellow and crimson and orange, and it was almost too much, like driving through a box of Froot Loops, or an old Technicolor Disney cartoon.

Miss Pool proved to be as efficient at giving directions as she was at managing the Bureau (everybody knew it was the FBI clerks who really ran the place): from Virginia, follow 495, the Beltway, northeast into Maryland; then take 190, the River Road, north past Potomac and turn west on Tinsman’s Lock Road. Pender’s driveway was the first (and last) one on the left, on the far side of the sign marking the entrance to the C&O Canal National Historical Park and telling you what you could and couldn’t do there.

It was dark by the time Linda turned down the long dirt drive. The other partygoers had parked in the overflow lot down by the canal and hiked back up the hill, so as not to screw up the surprise; the driveway was clear save for an old black muscle car—Linda parked behind it.

Some things never change, she realized, as she heard the laughter and music spilling out from the big wooden house. Thirty-five years old, seven years with the FBI, and the prospect of walking into a party where she hardly knew anybody still reduced Linda Abruzzi to the emotional age of five.

It’s okay, she reminded herself, you’re not here to socialize. Find Pender, ask him what you came to ask him, wish him luck on his retirement, maybe grab a crab puff. Then
arrivederci,
Abrootz—you’re out of there.

The front door was ajar; Pender, glass of Jim Beam in one hand and a shiny new beribboned Callaway driver in the other, was holding court on the far side of the rustic living room, over by the sliding glass doors that opened out onto the back porch. He saw her coming and proudly brandished the driver over his head. “Linda, what do you think of my gold watch?” Then: “Everybody, this hotshot here is Linda Abruzzi—she’s gonna be filling my thirteen double Ds back at Liaison Support.”

“If I can find them in that mess of an office, that is,” said Linda, to polite laughter. The first retort that had come into her mind was something about not leaving quite that big a footprint, but she didn’t want people looking down at her feet—she was still a little self-conscious about the shoehorn-style ankle braces built into the heels of her ugly orthopedic shoes, even though her slacks were tailored long to cover them.

And before she could ask Pender if they could talk privately, somebody tapped her on the shoulder; she turned to find herself face-to-face with another Bureau legend, Deputy Director Stephen P. McDougal. McDougal, according to scuttlebutt, had come within inches of being appointed director several years earlier, instead of Louis Freeh. Good-looking older man with tremendous presence and a head of thick white hair you wanted to walk barefoot through.

“How are you settling in, Abruzzi?”

“Excellent, sir. First rate.”

“Office all right? Need any special accommodations?”

“No, sir, I’m fine.”

“Good attitude,” said McDougal. “Behind you all the way.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Linda was relieved when he turned away—she’d found herself feeling the way she’d felt back in high school, encountering the principal in the grocery store. When do
I
get to be the grown-up? she wondered. And now Pender had disappeared. She glanced around, saw him out on the back porch, engaged in earnest conversation with a dapper old guy wearing what looked like one of Sinatra’s old toupees. She caught Pender’s eye; he waved to her to join them.

“Linda Abruzzi, this is Sid Dolitz. Best forensic shrink who ever wore a badge. Never treated a patient a day in his life, though.”

“Didn’t care much for crazy people,” Dolitz explained. “Bit of a handicap for a psychiatrist, but a plus as far as the Bureau was concerned.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too.” Dolitz had a neat little hand, not much bigger than Linda’s, and much better manicured. “I understand you have MS.”

“Yes?” As in
what of it?
In the few short months since her diagnosis, Linda had already met too many people who saw her disability before they saw her.

“So did my late wife. Would you mind terribly if I offered a suggestion?”

“I guess,” said Linda dubiously.

“Get yourself a cane before you throw your back out.”

“I’ll take it under consideration.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve offended you.”

“It’s okay.”

“Friends?”

“Friends.”

“In that case, can I offer you a glass of wine? I was just on my way into the kitchen to pop the top on a lovely looking Bordeaux—if you want good vino at Pender’s, you have to bring it yourself.”

“I’m on the wagon. But thanks anyway.”

Dolitz left. Linda leaned out over the wooden railing; below her, the dark hillside and the shiny black ribbon of the canal.

“Listen, Ed, I’m sorry to crash your party, but I needed to ask you a few questions, and Miss Pool said you were leaving town early tomorrow and that it would be okay to drop by.”