SUMMER of FEAR (20 page)

"Thank you," she said. Then she gave me that look, the one
that had launched a hundred products into a billion households, that look half
virginal and half carnal, inviting—no, imploring you—to partake in what was
being offered, reassuring you that this transaction, no matter how publicly
tendered, was and would forever remain a conspiracy of only two.

What she saw in my face, I do not know.

"You're welcome," I said. "Good
night."

"Good night, Russell."

I went to the
Marine Room, had two shots and two beers, sat on a stool at the window, and
watched the people walk by. The early-morning fog began to settle over the
coast. I watched claim the shoreline, the beach, the boardwalk, then ease
across Coast Highway, lap against the buildings, feel its way up Ocean Avenue,
bury the streetlights, enfold the men and women and babies in strollers, the
bums and dogs, the pigeons and gulls, the cats in the shadows, the eucalyptus
and bougainvillea, the parking meters, Hennesey's Tavern, the art gallery, the
sunglasses shop, the patrol car turning right on the highway, the sidewalk and
the cracks in the sidewalk and the weeds growing from the cracks. With the fog
came a hush I was not the only one aware of; it was a collective involuntary
pause, a hiatus the minds of everyone on that busy summer sidewalk. It crossed
their faces with the fog, and they slowed just a beat, like film decelerating
to almost slow motion, responding as if to a great invisible psychic speed bump
that everyone hit at once and no one knew was there. Something rippled across
their faces at that moment, a question. Husband glanced to wife; wife looked to
husband; lovers cuddled closer; those alone turned to look over their
shoulders, crossed the street suddenly, stopped to look around them, all faces
asking, What was that, me, someone, who,
me?
And at that precise
second, the band in the back room ended its song on the downbeat, and the hush
asserted itself through the bar in one of those rare moments during which all
conversation waits and silence rushes in to remind us that there was silence in
the beginning and there will be silence at the end and silence runs through
everything like a secret no one wants to hear. A flicker of fear crossed every
face in that bar. Our dread was one dread. Every expression confessed the
superfluity of our pretensions, the sheer effrontery of assuming that life in
the next heartbeat will be the same jolly thing we pretend it is now. Deep in
that silence, I heard a voice—a groan, a low-frequency command—but I couldn't
understand what it was saying. I have no idea whether anyone else heard it,
too. Then a great gust of laughter—forced, counterfeit, desperately applied—rose
up to claim the quiet and deny the truths the silence carried. The band kicked
in. I left.

I sat in my car
for a few minutes without running the engine and listened to the tape that
Amber had stolen from Martin Parish. It was the Midnight Eye. He stuttered and
mumbled his way through more unintelligible phrases:

"
C-c-cun seed brat cun wormin from
he...

Mustery move s-s-slime..."

I could make no sense of it. Surely, I
thought, if Amber was right and Martin was trying to blame the murder of Alice
on me, this tape should have been destroyed by now. When I had listened to it
twice, I placed the tape carefully beneath the floor mat of the car, where I
wouldn't step on it.

■ ■ ■

Traffic
slowed to a crawl in the canyon, just out of town, and took me twenty minutes
to inch along far enough to find out why. The Highway Patrol had set up one of
its Sobriety Check points to find drunken drivers. I could see the lights
flashing, the orange pylons cutting down the outgoing lanes to one, the CHP
officers shining lights into drivers' faces. I was secretly rooting for the
ACLU when it challenged the legality of these spot check but the courts upheld
the CHP's contention that they are necessary and constitutional. More of my
distrust of authority, more of my rankle at the long arm of control. The
thought came me that I might be better suited to a career in bank robbery than
law enforcement, but this was neither a new nor very probing idea. Writing
seemed a good way to split the difference.

I rolled down my windows, lighted a smoke, waited.

Up ahead, flashlights beamed into cars, officers
leaned toward open windows, a stream of released drivers pensive accelerated
north. In my rearview, I could see the fog moving in. Ten minutes later, it was
my turn. I steered the car between the rows of orange pylons, greeted the
officer with a nod, and waited. Behind him, I saw a familiar shape standing
outside prowl car, but just as I started to figure who it was, the flashlight
beam ached into my eyes.

"How are you tonight, sir?"

"Fine."

"Drinking tonight, sir?"

"Couple of beers."

"That's all?"

"That's right."

"For a total of how many, sir?"

"A couple still means two, last time I
checked."

He paused then, ran the flashlight across my backseat, the passenger
seat, then into my face again. A voice came from behind him, but all I could
see was white light. There was a moment of consultation—voices hidden by the
brightness of the beam—then the officer stepped away, and Martin Parish leaned
into my window. His eyes were bloodshot, his big, morally superior chin was
unshaven, his knit necktie fell forward against the door. With the flashlight
out of my eyes now, I could see the Sheriff's Department cars waiting up
ahead—three of them.

"Well, I figured we'd run across you,
Monroe," said Marty.

"Not hard, since this is the only road to my
house."

"Shall I let 'em test you? This clever Chip is just sure you've had
more than two."

"Up to you, Marty, but two is what I've
had."

"That'll be the day."

Marty walked around the front of my car, the headlights throwing his
shadow along the asphalt. He opened the passenger door, got in, and closed it.
"I'll escort you home, Russell. These Chippies have your number."

"I sense an ulterior motive."

"I'm one big ulterior, Russ. Drive."

"Long walk back, Marty."

"I got it covered."

The officer waved me down a long corridor of pylons that angled into the
road. My turnoff was less than a mile out. I stopped at the box, got my mail,
then headed up the steep, winding drive that leads to the stilt house. When we
made the top and leveled off, I could see the Sheriff's Department car parked
outside my home. The idea came to me that it was more than just Marty's ride
back to the checkpoint. I swung around it and down into my driveway. A deputy
in uniform learn against the car and watched us go by. I wondered whether Marty
was about to return the beating I'd given him at the beach on the night of July
the Fourth. Overkill, I thought. I parked the garage.

We got out and walked back up the driveway to the departmental car. The
deputy was a tall, wide man with short black hair, a strong nose, and high
cheekbones. He looked Indian, and his badge said Keyes. Marty introduced us,
but he neither spoke nor offered his hand. His eyes were black, small and
contained an unmistakable meanness.

"What's the deal?" I asked.

"There really is no deal," said Marty. "Not in the sense
that you can negotiate anything."

"Sounds like you've got me cold."

"Everybody's cold tonight, Russ. Look, we're going to do something
kind of unorthodox here, but the alternative is I take you downtown for the
murder of Alice Fultz."

"Who in the hell is that?"

"Keyes," said Marty. "Roll em."

Keyes produced a video camera from the front seat his car, Marty stepped
away from me, and then the light went on and the lens aimed into my face.

"Come on, Marty," I said. "Get in
here."

"I'll edit out what you fuck up, so never
mind."

"Like the camera, Keyes? Like your job with the Sheriff of Orange
County?"

Keyes said nothing, but he looked away from the eyepiece and the light
went out.

In the moment of bedazzlement that hits the eye when brightness goes to
black, Marty swung a heavy fist into my sternum. I heard my breath heave out
into the canyon air, felt the pressure shoot into my head, heard a siren whine
shriek into my ears. Doubled over and still waiting for fresh air to get to my
lungs, I tried to keep my balance. Marty grabbed my hair and belt and threw me
straight down onto my face. The asphalt was warm; the gravel bit into my elbows
and cheeks. But my breath came rushing back. I lay there, letting it in.

"This is what you're going to do, Russ. You're going to walk down
the driveway to your garage, go in, turn on the light. Then you're going to
stand in front of your game freezer and open it. Then we'll cut and I'll tell
you what the next scene is. I'm the director; you're the star. Got it?"

"Yup," I said, but my voice was feeble and
soprano-high.

"Repeat," he said.

I did.

Then he dragged me up by my hair, steadied me, and shoved me toward the
garage.

"Action," he said.

I lumbered on reluctant legs down the steep driveway. The light of the
video camera sprayed out on either side of me. I looked for a moment toward
town, from which the fog continued to advance like a white blanket pulled by
invisible hands. Where the slope of the driveway levels off at the garage, I
stumbled and almost fell. My ears were still screaming.

The garage door was up and I went in. The video beam followed me, but I
hit the light, as instructed. I turned to the right, away from my car and
toward the freezer. I stopped in front of it, looked once at Marty, then
reached out and lifted the heavy handle. The door followed, gaskets sucking,
then releasing a brief cloud of frost into the air. When the frost cleared
upward, I looked down and saw what I had been half-expecting ever since Marty
had outlined his screenplay idea.

Twisted, stiff, blue-black and covered with blood, her hair a solid
block against the far wall, her face beaten beyond recognition and frozen in a
horror that seemed freshly, eternally preserved, lay the body of Alice Fultz.
She still had on the blue satin robe. In her hair still lodged the white and
pink particulars that had jumped forth from her bursting skull. Her legs had be
crammed to fit the freezer, but her arms were still spread they had been on
Amber's floor—open, apart, frozen in mid now as if welcoming me: Come down,
come down here, my love, take me, embrace me, own me.
I am yours.

Keyes came up
behind me and to my left, aiming the camera down into the freezer. I turned
right, finding Marty, fixing him with a look that must have been half outrage
and half revulsion. The idea crossed my mind that my expression could do more
to establish my innocence than a thousand words, but by the time I turned to
Keyes, his camera was down and he was studying me with his black unforgiving
eyes.

"I guess we both know by now that you killed the wrong woman,"
said Parish.

"I didn't kill her."

"Right.
Grace
killed the wrong woman. It was a mistake even
a daughter could make—a dark room, a bed that's usually got someone else in it,
all those emotions boiling up inside. The way I've got it figured, Grace
probably thought she'd done her mother until you got there later for the
transfer and saw the, uh, mix-up. You cleaned it up anyway—that's what the
fallback plan called for—but you couldn't dump Amber's body in the freezer
because you didn't have Amber's body. So you put Grace's mistake on ice until
you could figure out what to do with it. That thing in there used to be Amber's
sister, Alice, you haven't figured it out by now."

I searched Marty's face for a flicker of the madness I knew was in him,
but all I saw was a gloomy, bovine conviction that he knew a terrible truth. It
disturbed me almost as deeply as the woman lying in my freezer.

"Everything you believe is wrong," I said.

"Then enlighten me, Monroe."

"I can't. All I can say for sure is, I didn't kill her and Grace
didn't kill her, and I don't know what's going on."

Marty nodded, a humoring, condescending thing. "That sure wouldn't
play in court, friend, not with a body in your fridge. And it doesn't play with
me."

"I'll take my chances," I said. I put my hands together front
of me—offering them for the cuffs.

"No."

"No? You're the head homicide dick for the whole county, you pinch
me with a body in my garage, and you won't even make an arrest? What's the
problem, Martin?"

"The problem is, I love two things that you don't—my wife and my
job. If I take you down, both of those go with you. I'll be damned if I'm going
to let JoAnn hear you testify that I was in Amber's house those nights. I'll be
extra damned if I'm going to make Winters answer for what I did. He'd have to deliver
my head on a plate, just to keep his own on. No! You're not worth it. Neither
is Alice Fultz—God rest her soul. You surprise me, Monroe, in a weird way. I
didn't think you be willing to drag Isabella through all that. Seems like the
last thing she needs is you in jail on a murder rap. I guess anybody fucked-up
enough to kill a lady for money is fucked-up enough to wreck his own wife, too.
Or was trotting Isabella into court in her wheelchair one of your defense
licks—if it came to that?"