The Face (16 page)

CHAPTER 23

R
OWENA, MISTRESS OF THE ROSES, RECALLED Dunny Whistler’s words again, but obviously more for her consideration than for Ethan’s: “He said you think he’s dead, and that you’re right.”

A rattle of hinges, a faint jingle of shop bells turned Ethan toward the front door. No one had entered.

The vagrant wind, having wandered out of the storm for a while, had here returned, blustering at the entrance to Forever Roses, trembling the door.

Behind the counter, the woman wondered, “What on earth could he mean by such a bizarre statement?”

“Did you ask him?”

“He said it after he paid for the roses, on his way out of the shop. I didn’t have a chance to ask. Is it a joke between the two of you?”

“Did he smile when he said it?”

Rowena considered, shook her head. “No.”

From the corner of his eye, Ethan glimpsed a figure that had silently appeared. Turning toward it, breath caught in his throat, he discovered that he had been tricked by his own reflection in the glass door of a cooler.

In pails of water, on tiered racks, the chilled roses bloomed so gloriously that you could easily forget they were in fact already dead, and in a few days would be wilted, spotted brown, and rotting.

These coolers, where Death concealed himself in petals bright, reminded Ethan of morgue drawers, in which the deceased lay much as they had looked in life, and in whom Death dwelt but did not yet manifest himself in all the gaudy details of corruption.

Although Rowena was personable and lovely, although this realm of roses ought to have been pleasant, Ethan grew anxious to leave. “Did my…my friend have any other message for me?”

“No. That was all of it, I think.”

“Thank you, Rowena. You’ve been helpful.”

“Have I really?” she asked, looking at him strangely, perhaps as puzzled by this odd encounter as by her conversation with Dunny Whistler.

“Yes,” he assured her. “Yes, you have.”

Wind rattled the door again as Ethan put his hand upon the knob, and behind him Rowena said, “One more thing.”

When he turned to her, although they were now almost forty feet apart, he saw that his questioning had left her more pensive than she had been when he’d first approached her.

“As your friend was leaving,” she said, “he stopped in the open doorway, on the threshold there, and said to me, ‘God bless you and your roses.’”

Perhaps this had been a peculiar thing for a man like Dunny to have said, but nothing in those six words seemed to explain why the memory of them clouded Rowena’s face with uneasiness.

She said, “Just as he finished speaking, the lights pulsed and dimmed, went off—but then came on again. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, not with the storm, but now it somehow seems…significant. I don’t know why.”

Years of experience with interrogations told Ethan that Rowena had not finished, and that his patient silence would draw her out more surely and more quickly than anything he could say.

“When the lights dimmed and went off, your friend laughed. Just a little laugh, not long, not loud. He glanced at the ceiling as the lights flickered, and he laughed, and then he left.”

Ethan waited.

Rowena appeared to be surprised that she had said this much about such a small moment, but then she added, “There was something terrible about that laugh.”

The beautiful dead roses behind walls of glass.

A beast of wind snuffling at the door.

Rain gnashing at the windows.

Ethan said, “Terrible?”

“I don’t have the words to explain it. No humor in that laugh, but some terrible…quality.”

Self-conscious, she brushed at the spotless countertop with one hand, as if she saw dust, debris, a stain.

Clearly, she had said all that she wished to say, or could.

“God bless you and your roses,” Ethan told her, as though he were countering a curse.

He didn’t know what he would have done had the lights flickered, but they burned steadily.

Rowena smiled uncertainly.

Turning to the door again, Ethan encountered his reflection and closed his eyes, perhaps to guard against the sight of an impossible phantom figure sharing the glass with him. He opened the door, then opened his eyes.

In a growl of wind and a jingle of overhead bells, he stepped out of the shop into the cold teeth of the December night, and drew the door shut behind him.

He waited in the entry alcove, between the display windows, as a young couple in raincoats and hoods passed on the sidewalk, led by a golden retriever on a leash.

Relishing the rain and wind, the soaked retriever pranced on webbed paws, snout lifted to savor mysterious scents upon the chilly air. Before it fully passed, it looked up, and its eyes were as wise as they were liquid and dark.

The dog halted, pricked its floppy ears as much as they would prick, and cocked its head as though not entirely sure what kind of man stood here in the shelter of the coral-pink awning, between the roses and the rain. The tail wagged, but only twice, and tentatively.

Stopped by their canine companion, the young couple said, “Good evening,” and Ethan replied, and the woman spoke to the dog, “Tink, let’s go.”

Tink hesitated, searching Ethan’s eyes, and only moved on when the woman repeated the command.

Because the couple and the dog were headed in the direction of his SUV, Ethan waited briefly, to avoid following on their heels.

The leaves of the curbside trees were still gilded by lamplight, and from their pointed tips flowed drips and drizzles as glimmerous as molten gold.

In the street, the traffic appeared to be lighter than it should have been at this hour, moving faster than the weather warranted.

Awning by awning, Ethan approached the Expedition, fishing keys from his jacket pocket.

Ahead, Tink twice slowed to an amble, looked back at Ethan, but didn’t stop.

The ozone-scented cascades of rain couldn’t rinse away the yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread, which issued from one of the glittery restaurants preparing to open their doors for dinner.

At the end of the block, the dog halted once more, turning its head to stare.

Though her voice was muffled by distance, screened by the sizzle of rain and the swish of passing traffic, the woman could be heard saying, “Tink, let’s go.” She repeated the command twice before the dog began to move again, picking up the slack in its leash.

The trio disappeared around the corner.

Arriving at the red zone near the end of the block, where he had parked illegally, Ethan hesitated under the last awning. He monitored the approaching traffic until he saw a long gap between vehicles.

He stepped into the rain and crossed the sidewalk. He jumped over the dirty racing current in the gutter.

Behind his SUV, he thumbed the lock-release button on his key fob. The Expedition chirruped at him.

Having waited until there was no passing traffic to splash him, he rounded the back of the vehicle while a chance remained that he could avoid an immediate need for a dry cleaner.

Approaching the driver’s door, he realized that he had not taken a close look at the SUV itself from the shelter of the final awning, and suddenly he was convinced that
this
time, when he got behind the wheel, he would discover Dunny Whistler, dead or alive, waiting for him in the passenger’s seat.

The real threat lay elsewhere.

Entering from the cross street at too high a speed, a Chrysler PT Cruiser fishtailed in the intersection. The driver tried to resist the slide instead of steering into it, the wheels locked, and the Cruiser spun out.

In the spin, the left front bumper rapped Ethan hard. Clipped, flipped, he slammed into the Expedition, shattering the side window with his face.

He wasn’t aware of ricocheting off the SUV, collapsing to the pavement, but then he was down on the wet blacktop, tumbling, with the smell of exhaust fumes, with the taste of blood.

He heard brakes shriek, but not the Cruiser. Air brakes. Loud and shrill.

Something loomed, huge, a truck, loomed and immediately
arrived,
tremendous weight on his legs, hideous pressure, bones snapping like dry sticks.

CHAPTER 24

B
UNKED THREE-HIGH ALONG THE WALLS, LIKE travelers in a railroad sleeping car, the corpses lay in open berths, the journey from death to grave having been delayed by this unscheduled stop.

After switching on the light, Corky Laputa quietly closed the door behind him.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the assembled cadavers.

In any circumstances, he could reliably amuse himself.

“The next station on this line is Hell, with cozy beds of nails, hot and cold running cockroaches, and a free continental breakfast of molten sulfur.”

To his left were eight bodies and one empty berth. Seven bodies and two empty berths to his right. Five bodies and one empty berth at the end of the room. Twenty cadavers, with accommodations available to serve four more.

These dreamless sleepers lay not on mattresses but on stainless-steel pans. The bunks were actually open racks designed to facilitate air circulation.

This refrigerated chamber provided a dry environment no colder than five—and no higher than eight—degrees above freezing. Corky’s exhalations issued from his nostrils in twin ribbons of pale vapor.

A sophisticated ventilation system continuously drew air out of the room through exhausts near the floor. Fresh air pumped in through wall vents just below the ceiling.

Although the smell wasn’t conducive to a romantic candlelight dinner, it wasn’t instantly repulsive, either. You could half deceive yourself that this odor was not significantly different in character from the stale-sweat, foot-fungus, shower-mold bouquet common to many high-school locker rooms.

None of the resident dead was bagged. The low temperature and the strictly controlled humidity slowed decomposition almost to a halt, but the inevitable process
did
continue at a much reduced rate. A vinyl bag would trap the slowly released gases, becoming a heat-filled balloon and defeating the purpose of the refrigeration.

Instead of vinyl cocoons, loose white cotton shrouds draped the reclining dead. Except for the chill and the smell, they might have been the pampered guests at an exclusive health spa, taking a group nap in a sauna.

In life, few if any of them had ever been pampered. If one had seen the inside of a health spa, he had surely at once been ejected by security guards and warned never to trespass again.

These were life’s losers. They had died alone and unknown.

Those who perished at the hand of another were required by law to undergo autopsy. So were those who died by accident, by apparent suicide, from an illness not confidently diagnosed, and from causes that were not apparent and that were, therefore, suspicious.

In any big city, especially in one as dysfunctional as current-day Los Angeles, bodies often arrived at the morgue faster than the medical examiner’s overworked staff could deal with them. Priority was given to victims of violence, to possible victims of medical malpractice, and to those among the deceased who had families waiting to receive their remains for burial.

Vagrants without families, often without identification, whose bodies had been discovered in alleyways, in parks, under bridges, who might have succumbed from drug overdoses or from exposure to the elements, or from simple liver failure, were parked here for a few days, for a week, maybe even longer, until the medical examiner’s staff had time to conduct at least cursory postmortems.

In death, as in life, these castaways were served last.

A telephone hung on the wall to the right of the door, as though considerately provided to enable the deceased to order pizza.

Most lines permitted only in-facility communication, functioning as intercom links. The last of six lines allowed outgoing calls.

Corky keyed in Roman Castevet’s cell-phone number.

Roman, a pathologist on the medical examiner’s staff, had just come on duty for the evening shift. He was probably in an autopsy room elsewhere in the building, preparing to cut.

More than a year ago, they had met at an anarchists’ mixer at the university where Corky taught. The catered food had been second-rate, the drinks slightly watered down, and the flower arrangements less than inspired, but the company had been engaging.

On the third ring, Roman answered, and after Corky identified himself, he said, “Guess where I am?”

“You’ve crawled up your own ass and can’t get out,” Roman said.

He had an unconventional sense of humor.

“It’s a good thing this isn’t a pay phone,” Corky said. “I don’t have any change, and none of the cheap stiffs here will lend me a quarter.”

“Then it must be a faculty function. Nobody’s more miserly than a bunch of anticapitalist academics wallowing in the high life with fat checks from the taxpayers.”

“Some might see a wide vein of meanness in your humor,” Corky said with a severe note that wasn’t characteristic of him.

“They wouldn’t be mistaken. Cruelty is my creed, remember?”

Roman was a Satanist. Hail the Prince of Darkness, that kind of stuff. Not all anarchists were also Satanists, but many Satanists were also anarchists.

Corky knew one Buddhist who was an anarchist—a conflicted young woman. Otherwise, in his experience, the vast majority of anarchists were atheists.

In his considered opinion, pure anarchists didn’t believe in the supernatural, neither in the powers of Darkness nor in the powers of Light. They put all their faith in the power of destruction and in the new and better order that might arise from ruin.

“Considering your backlog of work,” said Corky, “it seems to me academics aren’t the only ones who don’t always earn their fat checks from the taxpayers. What do you guys do here on the evening shift—just play poker, swap ghost stories?”

Roman must have been only half listening. He didn’t pick up on the word
here
. “Banter isn’t your strong suit. Get to the point. What do you want? You always want something.”

“And I always pay well for it, don’t I?”

“The ability to pay cash in full is the virtue I admire most.”

“I see you people have solved the rat problem.”

“What rat problem?”

Two years ago, the media had given extensive grisly coverage to the fact that sanitary and pest-control conditions in this very room and elsewhere in this facility had been deplorable.

“The place must be rat-proof now. I’m looking around,” Corky said, “and I don’t see any lowbrow cousins of Mickey Mouse noshing on anyone’s nose.”

The silence of shocked disbelief greeted this statement. When Roman Castevet could speak, he said, “You can’t be where I think you are.”

“I’m exactly where you think I am.”

The smug self-satisfaction and sarcasm in Roman’s voice abruptly vaporized into a whisper fierce with self-concern. “What’re you doing to me, coming here? You’re not authorized. You don’t belong anywhere in the morgue, and especially not in
there
.”

“I have credentials.”

“The hell you do.”

“I could leave here and come to you. Are you in one of the autopsy rooms or still at your desk?”

Roman’s whisper grew softer but even more intense: “Are you nuts? Are you trying to get me fired?”

“I just want to place an order,” Corky said.

Recently Roman had supplied him with a jar containing tissue preservative and ten foreskins harvested from cadavers destined for cremation.

Corky had given the jar to Rolf Reynerd with instructions. In spite of his congenital stupidity, Reynerd had managed to pack the container in a black gift box and send it to Channing Manheim.

“I need another ten,” Corky said.

“You don’t come
here
to talk about it. You
never
come here, you moron. You call me at home.”

“I thought this would be a hoot, give you a laugh.”

Shakily, Roman said, “Dear Jesus.”

“You’re a Satanist,” Corky reminded him.

“Idiot.”

“Listen, Roman, where exactly are you? How do I get to you from here? We need to do some business.”

“Stay right where you are.”

“I don’t know. I’m getting a little claustrophobic. This place is beginning to spook me.”

“
Stay right where you are!
I’ll be there in two minutes.”

“I just heard something weird. I think one of these corpses might be alive.”

“None of them is alive.”

“I’m sure this one guy, over toward the corner, just said something.”

“Then he said you’re an idiot.”

“Maybe you’ve got a live one in here by mistake. I’m really starting to get creeped out.”

“Two minutes,” Roman insisted. “You wait right where you are. Don’t come blundering out of there, drawing attention to yourself, or I’ll harvest
your
foreskin.”

Roman terminated the call.

In the vault of the unknown and penniless dead, Corky hung up the phone.

Surveying his shrouded audience, he said, “With all humility, I could teach Channing Manheim a thing or two about acting.”

He expected and needed no applause. A perfect performance was its own reward.