Strangers (47 page)

Astonishingly, missing the sarcasm, Pepper said, “Yeah. How’d you know? I paid for the condo with hundred-dollar bills, so no credit check was necessary, and I’ve let them all think my family has money.”

Jorja did not bother to explain that heiresses did not pay for condominiums with bundles of hundred-dollar bills. She simply said, “Could we talk about Alan? What happened? What went wrong? I would never have thought Alan was the type to…to kill himself.”

Glancing at the doorman to make sure he had not left his post and drifted nearer, Pepper said, “Me neither, honey. I’d never have pegged him as the type. He was so…macho. That’s why I wanted him to move in and take care of me, manage me. He was strong, tough. Of course, a few months ago he started acting a little weird, and lately he was downright creepy. Weird and creepy enough that I was thinking about maybe finding someone else to look after me. But I didn’t expect he’d screw things up for me by killing himself. Christ, you just never know, do you?”

“Some people have no consideration,” Jorja said. She saw Pepper’s eyes narrow, but before the hooker could say anything, Jorja said, “Am I to understand that Alan was pimping for you?”

Pepper scowled. “Listen, I don’t need a pimp. Whores need pimps. I’m no whore. Whores give fifty-dollar blow-jobs, screw eight or ten Johns a day for whatever they can get, spend half their lives with the clap, and wind up broke. That’s not
me,
sister. I’m an escort for gentlemen of means. I’m on the approved escort lists of the finest hotels, and last year I made two hundred thousand bucks. What do you think of that? I got investments. Whores don’t have investments, honey. Alan wasn’t my pimp. He was my
manager.
In fact, he managed a couple of my girlfriends, too. I fixed him up with them because, at first, before he started getting strange, he was the best.”

Dazzled by the woman’s self-delusion, Jorja said, “And Alan took a managerial fee for handling your career—and theirs?”

Her scowl fading, somewhat placated by Jorja’s willingness to use euphemisms, Pepper said, “No. That was one of the best things about our arrangement with him. He was still a blackjack dealer, see; that’s where he made his money. He had all the contacts needed to manage us, but all he wanted for his trouble was free trade. I never knew a man who needed so much pussy. He couldn’t get enough. In fact, the last couple of months, he seemed obsessed with pussy. Was he like that with you, honey?” Repulsed by this sudden intimacy, Jorja tried to stop the woman, but Pepper would not be quiet. “In fact, the last few weeks he was so horny all the time that I started to think maybe I should dump him. I mean, there was something a little crazy about it. He’d do it and do it and do it until he just couldn’t get his pecker up to do it anymore, and then he’d want to watch X-rated videotapes.”

Jorja was suddenly angry that Alan had made her executor, forcing her to witness the moral squalor in which he had passed the last year of his life. And she was angry because she would have to find a way to explain his death to Marcie, who was already treading a psychological
tightrope. But she was not really angry with Pepper Carrafield; not angry but appalled, yes, because even Alan deserved a little mourning and respect from his live-in lover, more than this shark could ever give him. But there was no point in blaming the shark for
being
a shark.

One of the elevators opened, disgorging uniformed policemen, morgue employees, and a gurney bearing a corpse in an opaque plastic body bag.

Jorja and Pepper rose from the sofa.

Even as the stretcher was being rolled out of the first elevator, the doors of the second opened, and four more cops appeared, two in uniform plus a team of plainclothes detectives. A detective came to Pepper Carrafield and asked a few final questions.

No one asked any questions of Jorja. She stood rigid and suddenly numb, staring at the body bag that contained her ex-husband.

They rolled the gurney across the travertine. The wheels squeaked.

Jorja watched it moving away.

Two cops held the lobby doors while the morgue attendants pushed the gurney outside. It moved past the lobby windows. Jorja turned to observe its progress. She still felt no grief, but she was swept by a powerful wave of melancholy, a profound sadness at what might have been.

From the nearest of the elevators, where she was holding a door open, Pepper said, “Let’s go up to my place.”

Outside, they closed the doors of the coroner’s van.

In the elevator on the way up, and in a discreet whisper in the fourteenth-floor hallway, then continuing in a normal tone of voice as they entered her big living room, Pepper insisted on describing Alan’s peculiar sexual hunger. He had always had the carnal appetite of a gourmand, but apparently sex had become a sick obsession with him as his life had wound down through its last couple months.

Jorja did not want to hear about it, but stopping the hooker seemed more difficult than simply enduring her chatter.

In recent weeks, Alan’s days had been devoted to erotic pursuits, though it all sounded feverish and desperate rather than pleasurable. He had used sick leave and vacation time to spend long—often frantic—hours in bed with Pepper or others whose “careers” he managed, and there was no variation or perversion that he failed to explore to excess. The hooker chattered on: Alan had developed a fascination with lascivious substances, devices, appliances, and clothing—dildos, penis rings, spike-heeled shoes, vibrators, cocaine ointment, handcuffs….

Jorja, already weak-kneed and dizzy since seeing the body bag, grew queasy. “Please stop. What’s the point? He’s dead, for God’s sake.”

Pepper shrugged. “I thought you’d want to know. He threw away a
lot of his money on this…this sex binge. Since you’re the executor of the estate, I thought you’d want to know.”

•

The last will and testament of Alan Arthur Rykoff, which he had left with Pepper for safekeeping, was a simple preprinted one-page form of the type obtainable at any business supply store.

Jorja sat on a cobalt-blue Ultrasuede chair beside a lacquered black Tavola table, quickly scanning the will in the light from a high-tech, burnished-steel, cone-shaped lamp. The most surprising thing was not that Alan had named Jorja as executor, but that he had left what he owned to Marcie, whose fatherhood he had been prepared to deny.

Pepper sat on a black lacquered chair with white upholstery, near a wall of windows. “I don’t figure it’s much of an estate. He spent money pretty freely. But there’s his car, some jewelry.”

Jorja noticed that Alan’s will had been notarized just four days ago, and she shivered. “He must’ve been considering suicide when he had this notarized; otherwise, he wouldn’t have felt the need for it.”

Pepper shrugged. “I guess.”

“But didn’t you see the danger? Didn’t you see he was troubled?”

“Like I told you, honey, he’d been weird for a couple months.”

“Yes, but there must’ve been a noticeable change in him during the last few days, something different from that other strangeness. When he told you he’d made out a will and asked you to put it in that lockbox of yours, didn’t you wonder? Wasn’t there anything about him—his manner, his look, his state of mind—that worried you?”

Pepper stood up impatiently. “I’m no psychologist, honey. His stuff’s in the bedroom. If you want to give his clothes to Goodwill, I’ll call them. But his other stuff—jewelry, personal things—you can get them out of here right now. I’ll show you where everything is.”

Jorja was sickened by the moral squalor into which Alan had sunk, but she also felt a measure of guilt for his death. Could she have done something to save him? By leaving his few possessions to Marcie and by naming Jorja executor of his will, he seemed to have reached out to them in his last days, and although that gesture was pathetic and inadequate, it touched Jorja. She tried to remember how he had sounded on the telephone before Christmas, when she had last spoken with him. She remembered his coldness, arrogance, and selfishness, but perhaps there had been other more subtle things that she should have heard beneath the surface cruelty and bravado: distress, confusion, loneliness, fear.

Brooding on that, she followed Pepper toward the bedroom. She loathed this task, pawing through Alan’s things, but it had to be done.

Halfway down a long hall, Pepper stopped at a door, pushed it inward. “Oh, shit. I can’t believe the damned cops left it like this.”

Jorja looked in the open door before she realized that this was the bathroom in which Alan had killed himself. Blood was all over the beige tile floor. More blood was spattered over the glass door of the shower stall, sink, towels, wastecan, and toilet. The wall behind the toilet was stained with dried blood in a macabre pattern resembling a Rorschach blot, as if Alan’s psychological condition and the meaning of his death were there to be read by anyone with sufficient insight.

“Shot himself twice,” Pepper said, supplying details Jorja did not want to hear. “First in the crotch. Is that queer or what? Then he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

Jorja could smell the vague coppery scent of blood.

“The damned cops should’ve cleaned up the worst of it,” Pepper said, as if she thought policemen ought to be armed not only with guns but with scrub brushes and soap. “My housekeeper doesn’t come until Monday. And she’s not going to want to deal with this disgusting mess.”

Jorja broke the bloody bathroom’s hypnotic hold on her and stumbled blindly a few steps along the hall.

“Hey,” Pepper Carrafield said, “you okay?”

Jorja gagged, clenched her teeth, moved quickly along the hall, and leaned against the jamb of another doorway.

“Hey, honey, you
were
still carrying a torch for him, weren’t you?”

“No,” Jorja said softly.

Pepper moved closer, too close, putting an unwanted consoling hand upon her shoulder. “Sure, you were. Jesus, I’m sorry.” Pepper oozed unctuous sympathy, and Jorja wondered if the woman was capable of any genuine emotion that did not have its roots in self-interest. “You said you were burnt out on him, but I should’ve seen.”

Jorja wanted to shout:
You stupid bitch, I’m not carrying a torch for him, but he was still a human being, for Christ’s sake. How can you be so callous? What’s wrong with you? Is something missing in you?

But she only said, “I’m all right. I’m all right. Where are his things? I want to sort through them and get out of here.”

Pepper ushered Jorja through the doorway in which she had been leaning, into a bedroom. “He had the bottom drawers of the highboy, plus the left side of the dresser, and that half of the closet. I’ll help.” She pulled out the lowest drawer of the highboy.

For Jorja, the room suddenly was as eerie and unreal as a place in a dream. Her heart began to pound, and she moved around the bed toward the first of three things that had filled her with fear. Books. Half a dozen
books were stacked on the nightstand. She had seen the word “moon” on the spines of two of them. With trembling hands, she sorted through them and found that all six dealt with the same subject.

“Something wrong?” Pepper asked.

Jorja moved to the dresser, on which stood a globe the size of a basketball. A cord trailed from it. She clicked a switch on the cord and found the globe was opaque with a light inside. It was not a globe of the earth but of the moon, with geological features—craters, ridges, plains—clearly named. She gave the glowing sphere a spin.

The third thing that frightened her was a telescope on a tripod beside the dresser, in front of a window. Nothing about the instrument was different from other amateur telescopes, but to Jorja it seemed ominous, even dangerous, with dark and unknowable associations.

“Those’re Alan’s things,” Pepper said.

“He was interested in astronomy? Since when?”

“For the past couple months,” Pepper said.

The similarities between Alan’s and Marcie’s conditions troubled Jorja. Marcie’s irrational fear of doctors. Alan’s compulsive sex drive. Those were different psychological problems—obsessive fear in one case, obsessive attraction in the other—but they shared the element of obsession. Apparently, Marcie had been cured of her phobia. Alan was not as fortunate. He’d had no one to help him, and he had snapped, shooting off the genitals that had come to control him, putting a bullet in his brain. Jorja shuddered. It was too coincidental that father and daughter had been stricken by psychological problems simultaneously, but what made it more than coincidence was the
other
strangeness they shared: their interest in the moon. Alan had not seen Marcie in six months, and their most recent phone conversation had been in September, weeks before either had become fascinated by the moon. There had been no contact by which either could have transmitted that fascination to the other; it appeared to have sprung up spontaneously in each of them.

Remembering Marcie’s moon-troubled sleep, Jorja said, “Do you know if he was having unusual dreams? About the moon?”

“Yeah. How’d you figure that? He was having them, but he could never remember any details when he woke up. They started…back in late October, I think it was. Why? What’s it matter?”

“These dreams—were they nightmares?”

Pepper shook her head. “Not exactly. I’d hear him talking in his sleep. Sometimes he sounded afraid, but lots of times he’d smile, too.”

Jorja felt as if ice had formed in her marrow.

She turned to look at the lighted globe of the moon.

What in the hell is going on? she wondered. A shared dream? Is that possible? How? Why?

Behind her, Pepper said, “Are you okay?”

Something had driven Alan to suicide.

What might happen to Marcie?

8
Saturday, January 11

Boston, Massachusetts

The memorial service for Pablo Jackson was held at eleven o’clock Saturday morning, January 11, in a nondenominational chapel on the grounds of the cemetery where he was to be buried. The coroner and police pathologists had not been finished with the body until Thursday, so five days had passed between Pablo’s murder and his funeral.