Garden of Evil (11 page)

‘I was only asked to write about
my
Paradise, sir. Nobody else's.'

Jim was about to go on to the next student when there was a knock at the door, and Detective Carroll came in. She crossed straight over to Jim and cupped her hand around her mouth so that the class couldn't hear what she was saying, although her hair tickled Jim's left ear.

‘Mr Rook? Everything's clear now, outside, although the primary crime scene is still cordoned off and we still have at least half a day of forensic work to do. We've consulted with Doctor Ehrlichman and we've agreed that college will close early today, and try to make a fresh start tomorrow morning.'

‘Oh, OK,' said Jim. He turned around to Special Class Two and said, ‘Looks like Paradise will have to be postponed for now. You can all pack up your books and beat it.'

They began to push back their chairs back and noisily gather up their belongings, and it seemed like all of their iPhones started warbling and ringing and playing music all at once. As they shuffled out of the classroom, Jim called out, ‘Just one thing I want you to think of overnight! You're trapped in a space capsule, right? Going round and round the Earth with no prospect of being rescued for at least a year! You're allowed to take one book with you! Let me know tomorrow which book you would choose!'

As Simon Silence came past him, slinging his white gunny sack over his shoulder, Jim said, ‘Shouldn't be a problem for you, Simon, choosing a book.'

Simon raised his eyebrows as if he didn't quite understand.

‘Well . . . your father being a reverend and all. There's only one really good book, isn't there?'

‘Oh. You mean the Bible. There are other good books. There is
one
good book in particular, which I would probably take with me.'

‘Oh, yes?'

Simon smiled and touched his finger to his lips. ‘I regret that its name is never spoken, sir. Some names, like the name of God, may be thought of, but never uttered out loud.'

With that, he walked off. Detective Carroll came up to Jim and said, ‘That the fruitcake Dave Brennan was telling me about?'

Jim nodded. ‘I don't know. At first, yes, I did think he was borderline bananas. Now . . . I'm not so sure.'

Traffic was stop-go all the way home on Sunset. The second apple that Simon Silence had given him was lying on the passenger seat next to him, rolling backward and forward every time he stopped for a traffic signal or to avoid rear-ending the vehicle in front.

He was trying very hard to resist the temptation to pick it up and bite into it. There was something about its pale pink-and-green color that just made it
look
as if it were going to taste deliciously sweet and sour, and if it tasted anything like the first apple, he knew that it would.

Yet, strangely, he felt almost virtuous for leaving it where it was. It rolled back, it rolled forward. It came close to rolling off the seat but still he didn't make a grab for it.

When he reached the Vine Street intersection, however, traffic up ahead of him had come almost to a standstill because of a burst water main underneath the Hollywood Freeway, and three lanes were merging left into one. He had to sit under the gloomy concrete pillars of the freeway for more than five minutes, half deafened by impatient car horns, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and feeling hungrier and thirstier. Because he had gone to visit Jane this morning, he hadn't had time to stop for anything to eat or drink.

He glanced down at the apple. What had Oscar Wilde written? ‘I can resist anything except temptation.' And if that was a good enough excuse for Oscar Wilde – why not for him?

He had bitten into the apple before he knew it, and it
was
just as good as the first one. In fact it seemed even juicier and even sweeter, with that distinctive hint of sharpness which gave it so much character.

Not just character, either. It had an immediate effect on his emotions. He had taken only two or three bites before he was sure he could feel that warm wind blowing again, and hear that faint calliope music playing.

Even though he knew he was here, in his car, in the shadow of the freeway, he also felt as if he were on a seashore someplace, although he wasn't sure exactly where. The sun kept disappearing behind the clouds, so that the day continually brightened and faded, brightened and faded, and seagulls were crying out like lost children.

Something had happened on that day, long ago, and he was being reminded of it. Something had happened but it wasn't something that he wanted to remember. It was something hurtful and humiliating. He must have buried it so deeply in his mind that he couldn't even be sure that it had really happened, or if it had happened not to him but to somebody else altogether.

As the traffic crept forward along Franklin, he began to feel more and more distressed, and his breathing became increasingly hard and harsh. He felt anger and embarrassment and an overwhelming urge to get his revenge, even though he didn't understand what for, and against whom, or why.

Just after he had turned into the narrow uphill slope of Briarcliff Road, he had to pull into the first driveway that he came to, because he was panting and sweating. He was gripping the steering wheel with both hands as if he were trying to wrench it away from the steering column. He was filled with such rage and frustration that he clenched his teeth tightly together and let out a roar like an angry beast.

He was still sitting there when an elderly man in yellow-and-blue Bermuda shorts came down the steps from the house and tapped with his knuckle on his passenger-side window.

Jim took three or four deep breaths and then let the window down. The elderly man looked like a Thanksgiving turkey in sunglasses, with a red shriveled neck.

‘Help you?' he asked.

‘No . . . no I'm good, thanks.'

‘I'll be wanting to pull out of here in a couple of minutes.'

‘Oh, really?'

‘Well . . . you're kind of blocking me in here, aren't you?'

Jim took another deep breath. ‘I'm having a brief think, OK? I don't recall anybody receiving a traffic citation for having a brief think. In fact more people ought to do more of it, what do
you
think?'

‘I think I have to take my wife to the orthodontist and you're blocking my driveway.'

‘I hear you. And when I'm good and ready, I'll go.'

The elderly man took a step back and looked at Jim's car. ‘I've seen you before, haven't I, in this old junker? You live just up the road a ways, in Briar Cliff Apartments.'

‘So?'

‘So, if you want yourself a brief think, my friend, why don't you take your old junker up to your own driveway and have your brief think there?'

Jim stared at him. He couldn't remember when he had ever felt such contempt for anybody in his life. When he spoke, his voice was shaking with anger.

‘How old are you, granpa?' he asked him.

‘Eighty-one, not that it's any of your concern.'

‘Eighty-one? Then for your information you have just exceeded the average life expectancy in Los Angeles County by seven months. I wouldn't take your wife to the orthodontist, old man. I'd visit your mortician and start making arrangements for Forest Lawn.'

‘That's it!' the elderly man told him. ‘I'm calling the cops on you! Nobody speaks to me like that, right in my own driveway! I used to be vice-president of Orange-Freeze!'

‘Don't panic,' Jim told him. ‘I'm going. You were just what I needed to remind me of something important.'

‘Oh, yes? And what's that?'

‘For some people, old man, death can't
ever
come too soon.'

With that, he swerved out of the elderly man's driveway and made his way two hundred yards further up the hill, to his own apartment block. He parked with a squeal of tires, and sat in his car for a further few minutes, with the engine and the air conditioning running. When he eventually climbed out he was still breathing hard, and the back of his shirt was clammy with sweat.

What the hell is the matter with you, Jim
?
You never shout at people for no
reason. Mr Reasonable, that's you
. Yet he was still so angry with that elderly man down the road that he could have walked back and punched him in the face, and broken his beak for him. Well, he looked like a fucking turkey.

He was climbing the steps to the first-story landing when the front door of Apartment 1 opened and Nadine stuck her head out, almost as if she had been waiting for him. She was wearing a droopy brown kaftan and smoking a cigarette in a very long holder.

‘You're back early,' she told him.

Jim stopped in front of her, and shifted his eyes from side to side without actually looking at her directly, like a blind man. ‘Oh yes. And?'

Nadine's forehead furrowed. ‘And – you're back early, that's all. I was just wondering why. You know, neighborly nosiness. That's all.'

‘If you must know there's been another homicide, pretty much identical to the first one. Some young man killed and whitewashed but nailed to a tree, this time, instead of a ceiling. He was surrounded by white Persian cats, eight of them, the same as before. You'll hear all about it on the news.'

‘Oh my God. It's so
strange
. But it's so
magical
, too. Eight white cats! I can't imagine that this isn't magic. Why haven't my Tarot cards picked up on it? Usually, they're so sensitive to anything at all.'

‘Because your Tarot cards are nothing but hocus-pocus, Nadine. You know that and I know that. I could sit down and draw my own deck of fortune-telling cards and they would be just as meaningful as the Tarot. Or not. The Rook Cards, think about it. I could be the Grumpy Teacher and you could be the Anorexic Hippie.'

Jim tried to make his way past her so that he could go up to his own apartment but Nadine caught his sleeve. ‘Actually, no BS, Jim. It's Ricky.'

‘What do you mean “it's Ricky”?'

‘Well, you know how he kept on painting that same white face? Now he's stopped painting it, and he's painted somebody else. Please – come take a look, would you?'

Jim hesitated. He still felt fractious, and out of sorts, and he didn't want to discuss anything with anybody – especially that dopey nineteen-sixties throwback Ricky. But Nadine was looking at him so appealingly that he couldn't say no.

‘OK,' he said. ‘But I'm only coming in for a couple of minutes. I have a shitload of homework to mark.'

Of course he didn't have any homework to mark, but he desperately needed to lie down and close his eyes and try to get that woman's voice and that calliope music out of his head. At the moment he couldn't think about anything else. Even now he could still hear the seagulls crying, very faintly, as if somebody were calling him from very far away. ‘
Jim
!
Jim
!'

Nadine led him through to the living room. The drapes were drawn, so that the room was stuffy and almost in total darkness, apart from a single vertical band of sunlight which was shining in where the drapes didn't quite meet together. From what Jim could make out, the room appeared to be even more cluttered than usual. There seemed to be twice as many empty Raffallo's pizza boxes as he had seen in there before, and over by the window stood a half-dismantled moped, which he didn't remember seeing yesterday. The red parakeet was still sitting in its cage in the corner, noisily pecking at the bars and squawking from time to time, like some bad-tempered senior who was forced to stay in a sunset home.

The single band of sunlight fell directly down the center of Ricky's canvas. Ricky was hunched on the backless kitchen chair which he usually used when he was painting. He was still holding his palette, with his left thumb through it, and three or four brushes, all of which were still loaded with various shades of white and gray oil-paint. There were flecks of paint and rolling paper ash in his beard.

Jim negotiated his way between the pizza boxes and other assorted trash as if he were stepping through a minefield. As he approached, Ricky didn't take his attention away from his picture but sucked on the scrawniest of joints and said, ‘Hi there, Jim. Glad to see you. You finished early today, didn't you?'

‘Had some more trouble at college,' Jim told him. ‘If you ask me, something very stupendous this way comes, and it won't be long in coming.'

‘Well, I agree with you there, man. There's something in the air, all right. But I'm not so sure about stupendous. More like cata-fuckin'-strophic.'

He jabbed his brushes at the canvas.

‘Take a look at this, man,' he said. ‘Just take a look and tell me if you know who that is.'

In Ricky's freshly finished painting, The Storyteller was no longer the pale, watery, almost seraphic figure that he had been trying so hard not to paint before. Now it was dark, and shadowy, in an undulating cloak, just like the shadowy presence that Jim had almost run down in the smog, and which had appeared like a coil of black smoke on his balcony.

It had begun to appear more distinctly in his nightmare, sitting in his car with its eyes glittering deep inside its hood and its gray-gloved hand resting on the steering wheel. But now he could see clearly what it was – or
who
it was.

‘Jesus Christ, Ricky,' Jim told him. ‘That's amazing.'

‘Amazin'? You think so? I think it's the scariest fuckin' thing I ever painted in the whole of my life – especially considerin' I was tryin' to paint this merry old fat guy.'

The shadowy figure's head was no longer covered by a hood. It was large, and gray-skinned, and bony, with an overhanging forehead and pronounced cheekbones and a lantern jaw. Its eyes glittered as they had in Jim's nightmare, but now they looked triumphant, rather than sly.

He was smiling, gray-lipped, but not in the knowing way that Simon Silence smiled. He was smiling at his own superiority.