The Croning (20 page)

“Mr. Miller—” Don caught that snippet as a sort of cocktail party effect. He glimpsed a swarthy fellow with a bushy mustache, a Latin Tom Selleck, raise his hand in a drowning gesture. He struck Don as familiar somehow…

The dark man was body-blocked by a cataclysmically stoned surveyor from the Army Corps of Engineers, then Paul’s wife, Naomi Wolverton, sailed into the room, regal as Queen Victoria in her austere mourning dress and elegantly somber mien, lacking only tiara and scepter to complete the image. She waved to Don as he endured the verbal crossfire of a man in a bad tweed jacket, a history professor by the look of him, and from across the state line, Melvin Redfield the prodigal poet and heir apparent of the Pierce County Redfields, who owned enough of said county to convert it to a duchy were they so inclined. Melvin was a onetime high school baseball captain, fulltime wastrel, and prematurely gray. He’d always been shrill and his voice was in fine form after a snootful of Hennessy.

“My lord, Don, are you okay?” Naomi wrinkled her nose in mock horror at the sight of him shambling her direction.

Don casually shouldered aside a journalist from the
Spokane Star
and the journalist’s date, a leggy blonde who dressed as if she’d come fully accessorized from one of the local escort services, and kissed Naomi Wolverton’s gloved hand—it smelled of lilacs. His lips were rubber-numb and it was like nuzzling a piece of wood. He winked. “I’ve been abroad. Does it show?”

Naomi drew him aside, put a towering rubber plant between them and the bickering duo and assorted gawkers. “Paul was hoping you meant it when you said you’d come by. My bet was Michelle hopping a ride with a motorcycle gang and leaving you at the ranch with the cat and the tumbleweeds.”

“It’s a farm. Lots of weeds, true.” He glanced around for Lou’s ex-wife. “Cory—is she—”

“Oh yes, over there.” Naomi frowned in the direction of the parlor where Corinthia Plimpton held court, flashes of sequins and crimson through the sea of black suits. “The bitch brought a date to her husband’s funeral. Some sleazy producer. Can’t go without a man for ten seconds, can she?” When she was angry her lips made a ruby slash, her cheeks paled.

There was no safe answer to that one, so he changed the subject with cumbersome gallantry. “I wouldn’t have figured Lou to draw this big a crowd at his going-away party.” Don tossed down the dregs of his bourbon, craned his neck to catch a glimpse of Corinthia’s companion, the sleazy producer; a short, pasty guy in a charcoal suit, wraparound shades and a fistful of rings that twinkled in the dull chandelier blaze. All kinds of teeth. He was apparently in his element.

“He didn’t. The crowd is for
her
, obviously.” Which precisely mirrored Michelle’s sentiments regarding the funeral gala, except his lovely wife had deployed exceedingly colorful language to enhance her opinion.

There was no love lost between Naomi, Michelle and Corinthia and that simmering resentment went way back to some prep school feud, an aborted teen romance—the women had suffered crushes on Melvin Redfield’s elder brother, Kyle, who, according to all reports, was cut of a different cloth than his dilettante sibling, had made lieutenant in the Navy, gone into the family law business. Too bad Kyle clipped a power line while cruising around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Luke Whitman’s ultra-lite. The Whitmans were still smarting from that public relations disaster.

Naomi kissed his cheek and departed, swept up by a passing throng of Fortune Five Hundred types. Don grabbed another drink and pressed through the bodies and possibly someone called his name again, that celebrated phenomenon of biological acoustics. He kept pushing until he’d gone past the French doors onto the veranda where all was cool and subdued. The chairs glimmered rain-slick, so he leaned against the railing, bourbon in hand, and toyed with the notion of lighting his second cigarette of the season and dooming himself to yet another failure of character. Instead, he regarded the gathering darkness while his blood pressure descended and his nerves steadied.

Finally, he noticed a boy sitting in the opposite corner on a fancy iron bench. Bronson Ford, a preadolescent Ethiopian boy the Rourkes (who’d lost their first child under mysterious circumstances) had adopted the previous summer. Somebody, probably Kirsten Rourke, had dressed the kid to the nines in a Little Lord Fauntleroy getup complete with spats and a soft cap.

“Jesus,” Don said and gulped his triple Jim Beam in commiseration. Bronson Ford stoically rolled a cigarette, lighted it and smoked. His eyes floated oily and diabolic in the cherry glow. His skin shone like petrified mangrove. Don realized the boy was one of those who seemed ageless, a glider in the twilight between youth and maturity and the only clues were the lines on his brow, his cold eyes and the pockmarks of an impoverished ancestry.

Don wrinkled his nose at the pungent odor of marijuana, was touched by dizziness. He sneaked a few more glances at the boy before he mustered the courage to commit the egregious inanity, “Some party, huh?”

Bronson Ford exhaled and smirked knowingly. Amber light from the windows splashed his face as if it were the black oval of a projector screen. The night had fully crept among them and Don shivered and his glass was empty. He considered assaying the maelstrom inside.

“Mr. Miller!” The swarthy man with the heroic mustache emerged from the house. A second man, much taller and leaner, followed. Both men wore serviceable suits; nothing shabby, although hardly on par with the heavyweights, yet a cut above the professors and assorted engineering types.

Don had dealt with enough governmental agencies to recognize the handmaidens of the bureaucracy when they appeared; devils sans the requisite puff of smoke. “Well, well,” he said. “You two were at the funeral. The lurkers.”

The swarthy one made the introductions. “Vaughn Claxton. You remember my colleague Maurice Dart. Nice to see you again. We’d hoped to chat.” Not,
So sorry, old chap, about your mate what offed himself
, or,
Condolences, my friend, sorry for your loss
. Instead,
We hoped to chat
.

See him again? Chat? Don automatically disliked the sound of it, whatever it meant. The duo smelled of airport aftershave and Mr. Claxton smiled fiercely as they shook hands. Mr. Dart didn’t smile at all. His face hung oblong as a waterlogged piñata and was utterly melancholy. Mr. Claxton nodded at Bronson Ford. “Hiya, kiddo. California Gold? Nope, too dark—no offense. Colombian, then. Make with the bud, eh?” There was no warmth in the greeting, only a queer, pseudo familiarity, the implication of accustomed authority lent by official credentials and jackboots.

Bronson Ford expressionlessly took another long hit. He slowly held forth the joint in his left hand and Mr. Claxton strode over and took it and squinted as he dragged. He coughed and his cheeks darkened. He handed the joint to Mr. Dart and Mr. Dart drew in the smoke, held it expertly in the manner of a blooded veteran, before exhaling. His expression was a pallid, moony reflection of Bronson Ford’s. The tall man offered the rapidly dwindling joint to Don.

“Um, thanks anyway,” Don said, edging from their tribal campfire circle toward the doorway, from which spilled light and the tidal roar of tipsy conversation. Civilization and its protections seemed suddenly remote. Three pairs of eyes focused upon him and Mr. Claxton frowned ominously.

“It’s easier than slicing our palms, trust me,” Mr. Dart said.

Don said, “Okay, sure. One can’t hurt.” He accepted the joint and inhaled clumsily; it had been ages since his days of rebellious toking behind the bleachers at school and later in the dorms at college. The rush almost knocked him over. He tried to speak and ended up hacking and retching. Claxton smiled benignly, as if to acknowledge that all was well, that they had forged a brotherly compact and now secrets could be safely exchanged, and retrieved the joint.

No one spoke for a minute or two, or fifteen, Don wasn’t certain because time had become rather elastic and he was dizzy. He gripped the rail for dear life and peered at the black masses of tree tops on the hillside below the house and wondered about the songbirds in their secret nests, the scrabbling mice, the silently gliding owls. The stars jumped. He could not remember the best grass ever having such a visceral effect upon his senses. Kent Pepper had confided that the native strains were getting stronger with each new crop.

Bronson Ford rose quickly and scuttled back inside and the men watched him depart.

“I’m Sicilian with a Welsh influence,” Mr. Claxton said, his voice booming like a god speaking from the clouds. “Tom Jones meets the
Cosa Nostra
. You were staring.”

“The Sicilian for cruelty and ruthlessness, the Welsh for his charm,” Mr. Dart said. “You should hear him in the shower. Lawrence Welk more than Tom Jones, I’d say. Vunnerful, vunnerful.”

Mr. Claxton said, “You work for AstraCorp.”

“I’m a consultant,” Don said.

“A long-term consultant.”

“Eh, the projects last as what they last…Say, what is it you fellows do?”

“We’ve got government jobs. Great dental.” Mr. Claxton showed his teeth. “Yeah, AstraCorp. Man, the Rourkes sorta own that baby. Don— may I call you Don?—you’re working on a job on the Peninsula. Lot number, oops, lost it. Slango Camp it’s called. Timber company logged the shit out of those mountains during the 1920s. Now it’s being prepped for some new development, yeah?”

Don nodded warily. “Sure, that’s public knowledge, I guess.” He didn’t volunteer the fact AstraCorp was conducting its portion of an environmental impact study for some energy development company in California. Don hadn’t gotten physically involved—his task was to line out the surveyors and other specialists and ride herd on the paperwork. He eyed Dart and Claxton (instantly dubbing them Frick and Frack) and tried to guess their angle. Possibly they weren’t feds after all, and instead represented rival interests to AstraCorp; espionage was common in the industry, but seldom this overt.

“Right on. Slango’s got a history. How many loggers disappeared from that camp in 1923? Two hundred wasn’t it?”

Mr. Dart said, “You have a big-time physicist on the clock up there. Vern Noonan. Hot shit dude, huh? Kinda like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer bringing in a gun that size. Come on, level with me—what’s really on the agenda at Slango?”

“Gosh, I wouldn’t be able to venture a guess,” Don said. A small lie; he’d seen Noonan’s name on the manifests and felt a twinge of curiosity regarding the man’s presence on an involved, if pedestrian, feasibility study.

“Have you met Dr. Herman Strauss? Old evil German scientist, did big things at R&D for the company back during the height of the Red Scare—became Herr Director, in fact. There’s the secret to how we won World War Two—our Nazi scientists were better than their Nazi scientists.”

“Er, no. Should I know him?”

“Hah, well, maybe. Mrs. Miller interviewed him for her first book. The interview got edited for content or length, or whatever. Very interesting fellow, Herman Strauss. Specialized in mind control and unorthodox applications of medicine and technology. Heh, if he hadn’t gotten press-ganged by the Allies, he’d probably be sipping mint juleps on one of those plantations in South America.”

Mr. Claxton tried next. “Hey, ever hear of a physicist named Nelson Cooye? Great big Lakota Indian. Chummy with Plimpton. He did research for Caltech, Stanford, MIT. A real stallion for an egghead.”

“Never met him,” Don said, trying to picture Cooye. He had the unhappy premonition that the guy was famous and something bad had happened to him and that somehow this terrible thing presaged something equally dreadful for Don himself. He recalled a newspaper photo, two and a half inches of print, rumors of uncontrollable violence, of public tirades. He didn’t normally keep track of physicists.

“Ah.” Mr. Claxton nodded. “But you hearda Cooye. Rather a renowned figure among the radical elements, the lunatic fringe. He was buddies with that one dude, Toshi Ryoko, guy that made a movie about his expeditions in the Far East. Another classic, lemme say. I heard a rumor he’s in the planning stages for a trip to some deathtrap of a wildlife preserve in Bangladesh. Bet he gets a Nobel if he can find backers.”

“Oh, Toshi,” Don said. Everybody in the civilized world knew of Toshi Ryoko the same way everybody knew of Jacques Cousteau or Dian Fossey. “Did something blow up in his documentary?”

“No. It’s about an expedition, is all. Nothing to do with the price of tea in China. Anyhoo, Cooye was a smidge wacko; a saucer watcher. Got himself and a few radical kids from Stanford arrested for trespassing on a government research facility in Nevada. Nothing important there, by the way—it’s the thought that counts.”

“Yeah, I don’t recall. Who do you gentlemen work for? FBI? CIA?”

“CIA doesn’t operate on American soil,” Mr. Claxton said. “That’s the line, anyhow. National Security Agency.”

“Uh-huh. Y’know, my grandfather always warned me to never talk to spooks.”

“Yep, he was a smart guy, your gramps. We’ll get to him. Back to Cooye. He rolled in a teeny Volkswagen. Can you imagine this six-eight dude jamming himself into one a those contraptions? Went off the road near Eureka. Burned up on the rocks.”

“When?”

“About six weeks ago. Sad, sad, y’know. Wonder what he was thinking about on the way down.”

“The highway patrol couldn’t locate the body,” Mr. Dart said. “Cops say he was thrown from the wreck and taken out to sea.”

“Yep, like a commode flushing.” Mr. Claxton mimed pulling a chain. “There’s a bore tide along that stretch of coast. No way they’ll ever find him unless he washes up somewhere, which I doubt. But on to the good parts: Plimpton,” and here the agent gestured to encompass the party being thrown in the dead man’s honor, “and Cooye moonlighted for the CIA during the ’60s. Cooye was a few years younger than you. CIA likes’em young and dumb. Your granddad knew Cooye pretty well, like a grandson, in fact; we’re confident Luther handled him during his tour in Bali. Course this is speculation—the company boys don’t play nice. But we’re betting Luther was the control. Small, small world, ain’t it.”