Werewolf Cop (18 page)

Mostly, the entire enterprise felt like a big fat waste of time; but there was one house—all the way out near Westhampton Beach—one of the last houses they went to—where Zach, at least, felt as if they had touched on something, though he wasn't sure what.

The place was a three-story shingled mansion, right on the water. The sort of house that had a name. Its name was Sea View. You approached it by a driveway lined with perfectly manicured, perfectly spaced cypress trees—until you reached a fountain in a circle of flowers on the rolling lawn. There was a curtain of black oaks protecting the long, gabled façade. The curtain opened in the middle to reveal the white portico before the front door.

“How much you think a place like this would set you back?” said Goulart as they stepped out of the Crown Vic—both of them sorely aware of how paltry the junker looked parked beside the silver-blue Bentley in the raked, pristine gravel of the cul-de-sac.

“Twenty-five, thirty million,” Zach guessed. “How the hell should I know?” It was the sort of conversation they'd been having for days so as to avoid talking about the results of Goulart's medical tests, none definitive yet, but each so far more ominous than the last.

Shoulder to shoulder, they walked to the door, their shoes crunching on the gravel.

Sea View was the home of one Angela Bose—the first name pronounced with a hard G, the way the Germans do it, which right there had both detectives on the alert. According to newspaper reports of the burglary, Miss Bose was an eccentric and reclusive young beauty, already at twenty-seven a leading donor to local charities, who single-handedly supported many of the homeless shelters and rehab centers between Montauk and Queens. The local gossip was that she had retired from the wayward party-days of her teens about a year and a half ago. Chastened by suffering, she had come here to live with her father, a European businessman, likewise reclusive. But when Zach called her on the phone, she told him “Come out anytime, I'm here all alone.”

“She had a slight accent—could've been German,” he told Goulart—and again, alert, they exchanged glances.

A maid answered the mansion door—a pretty Spanish girl in a black maid uniform with a frilly white collar and apron. She told them she would fetch Miss Bose and left them in the foyer.

“You think her boyfriend spanks her in that uniform?” Goulart asked as he watched her go.

Zach cracked up. “Would you shut up, Broadway. God Awmighty.”

“Look at this place.”

Zach did. They'd seen a lot of fine houses these last few days, but this had to be one of the finest. No flash, just clean elegance. Persian rugs over parquet floors with walnut inlay. A straight-through view from the foyer to the tumultuous surf visible through the picture windows in the grand back room. A switchback staircase with a white balustrade and a walnut banister going up to one balcony and then another. Gold designs painted straight into the white, white walls.

It sure is purty,
Zach was about to drawl aloud, but before he could get the words out, he caught a whiff of something—something dark, fulsome; offensively organic. The word
blood
went through his mind, and he thought of a great red, thick, rancid pool of blood, before he shook the word and the image off and told himself to stop this crazy nonsense—whereupon Angela Bose appeared from around a corner and said “Welcome, Detectives. Come this way please.”

Was this another symptom of his fever: this maddening patina of the uncanny that lay over ordinary things? Moment to moment, Zach was not sure whether Angela Bose was one of the most beautiful glamour-queens he'd ever laid eyes on, or the product of some sort of artifice—makeup or plastic surgery or something—disguising a face and figure that would otherwise have appeared withered and unpleasantly overripe. She seemed to change even as he looked at her—which could've been a trick of the beach-light pouring through the wall of windows in the back room, catching her at different angles as she turned gracefully from one of them to the other. Or maybe, even at twenty-seven, she had simply reached that precise second when a woman's perfect youth trembles on the brink of ending. . . .

Or maybe he was just going loony.

Whatever it was, Zach got the idea in his head that, despite the strong and chiseled and regal features beneath her shoulder-length auburn hair, and despite the sleek figure in her white blouse and white slacks, Angela Bose was secretly a shriveled cadaver that had somehow been inflated to a semblance of vitality and loveliness as a tick is bloated with blood. He kept catching the aroma of blood in the room. And the aroma of corruption.

The maid placed a tray of coffee and china on the low table set among the cushioned wicker chairs, but Angela Bose poured for them herself. She spoke without condescension or self-consciousness, but Zach could see that her manners were elegant and ladylike as if she were, as he put it to himself, highborn.

“Could you tell us if the thieves took anything really valuable?” he asked her.

“There was a gold brooch that I was quite fond of, handed down from my great-great-grandmother,” she said. “Of tremendous sentimental value, though the insurers only assessed it at eight or nine thousand dollars. And they stole a drawing by Bosch that I do believe is worth something. I suspect they made off with that by accident, though, because they took a lot of worthless prints and watercolors besides—probably for the frames.”

“Excuse me asking, but what sort of accent is that you have, ma'am? Is that German?” Zach said. He sipped his coffee from a cup decorated with roses.

“Dutch, actually. My family has been in the Netherlands for some four hundred years. What about your accent, Agent?”

“West Texas. My grandpappy was a moonshiner and that's all I know.”

She smiled graciously—though damned if there wasn't something skullish and awful about it too. Or was this just more creepy stuff from his imagination?

“You ever hear of a fellow named Dominic Abend?” said Goulart, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

“No. No, Agent, I don't believe so.”

Goulart unfolded the photo from his jacket pocket and showed it to her. She looked it over—and Zach could have sworn she recognized it, but at this point he didn't trust his own instincts.

“No,” she said. “It is not a very good picture, of course. But I don't think I've ever seen this man.”

Outside, on the beach through the picture window, a green wave rose against the blue sky and crashed down upon the yellow sand. The white froth of the surf seemed to be reflected by the thin white clouds above.

“You live here with your father?” said Zach.

“No. Pa-pa lives in Amsterdam. He visits me from time to time, and the house is in his name.”

“Which is?”

“His name? Herman Bose. Von Bose, actually, but he doesn't like the aristocratic pretension. He owns a shipping company. I'm curious why you should ask.”

Zach gestured with his coffee cup. “This Dominic Abend we're looking for is German. I'm just casting around for any possible connections.”

“Of course.” She smiled again—politely this time—and her bright blue eyes went up and down him. It was not a mere sexual appraisal, he thought. She seemed to be taking his full measure. When she was done, she inclined her chin slightly as if to say she knew him now, she knew who he really was, deep down.

“There wasn't any kind of weapon stolen, was there?” he asked her. “A dagger. A sword. Something like that.”

Her eyes were still lingering on his face so that when she lied—and Zach felt sure she was lying, sure enough that his heart raced—he thought he could see a look of irony in them. She seemed to be sending him a message that went something like,
Forgive me, but now I must lie to you, even though we both know I am lying. It is simply what must be done.

“No,” she said aloud. “There was nothing like that. I
have
given a full inventory of what was stolen to the local police, you know. I'm sure they would happily share it with you.”

Driving back into the city, Zach spoke only after the Crown Vic was on the expressway, only when he felt he had put some distance between the rear fender and Sea View, as if he was afraid Angela Bose would overhear him.

“You get the feeling she was lying?”

Goulart rounded on him in surprise. “No! Did you? I thought she was being totally straight with us.”

“Really?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, the whole accent and everything had me on the lookout, but there's a lot of these European types out here. Especially recently, with all of them escaping from the apocalypse and so on.”

“I thought I saw something in her eyes when she looked at Abend's picture. Like she recognized him.”

Goulart shrugged and shook his head: he hadn't spotted it.

Which bothered Zach. Because Goulart was such a mind reader. And he, Zach, had thought it was so obvious. But then he'd also thought he smelled blood and corruption. He also thought he'd been attacked by malicious giant cockroaches and that he was being haunted by a German college professor. . . . So, yeah, maybe Angela Bose
was
lying and maybe Goulart was on the take and covering up for her, or maybe Goulart was just not at his observational best because he was distracted by his medical problems, or maybe Goulart was lying about his medical problems too. . . . Or maybe Zach was just going out of his ever-loving mind. Hard to say at this point which scenario was more likely to be true.

“Can I ask you something?” he said after another while.

Goulart grunted. “Sure.”

“Not sure how to put this exactly, but . . . all you been going through? The medical stuff and all.”

“Yeah?”

“You ever give any thought to the big picture? God and the supernatural and like that.”

“You're not gonna preach to me, are you, Cowboy?”

“No, no, not at all, I'm just . . . curious, I guess.”

He heard Goulart take a deep breath in and out through his nose. “Well. . . . Who the hell wouldn't give it some thought, right? In my position. The way I see it: sure, maybe there's a god, and maybe not. But maybe the thing is: it doesn't make any difference. You ever think of that? I mean, maybe there's a god and this is all just his train set or something. Maybe we're like a TV show he watches in his spare time. Because he likes the sex scenes and the car chases. ‘Nuclear war? Yeah, that was cool. Great special effects. Wonder what else is on.'”

“Well, what about . . . ?” Zach stopped.

“What? No, go ahead. This is good. We're sharing. It's like we're partners. Gives me a warm glow. Kiss me, you beautiful son of a bitch.”

Zach gave a crooked smile, but he pushed on too. “Well, to be honest, I was thinking about the practical side of it. You think there could be . . . supernatural stuff? Here on Earth, I mean. Evil stuff. Or even supernatural good stuff. I mean, Grace, she's always talking about miracles and God's will and the Enemy's schemes and all that. Angels. Demons.” He eye-checked Goulart to see if he would laugh at that, but he only gave a small snort. “I know, but she really believes in it. My mama did too. And they weren't stupid, either of them. I mean, sure, women, you know, are crazy and all that, but they're not always wrong about things. And Grace—well, she knows people. She understands the world, in some ways. In some ways better than I do. She gets a lot of stuff right.”

“Hey,” said Goulart in a broad-minded tone—because you never disrespected your partner's wife, and he'd always liked Grace, all the guys did. “It's as good a way of describing things as any. There may not
really
be a devil, but the world behaves exactly as if there was. So if you believe in that stuff—yeah, you'll never go far wrong.”

Zach grunted thoughtfully in response, but in fact the answer wasn't much help to him. Was it possible there were ghosts and magic daggers and marauding cockroaches, or not? That's what he wanted to know.

The sun went down beyond the windshield, and the blue of the sky began to deepen. The expressway street lights came on, and so did the oncoming headlights, and so did the diamond-like gleams of house windows that were splayed to the left and right of them in the Island towns.

“The thing is,” said Goulart, “when you look into the abyss. . . . 'Cause that's why you're asking me this shit, right? 'Cause let's face it, I'm looking smack dab into the abyss.”

Zach answered with a gesture so he wouldn't have to lie—because, of course, that wasn't why he was asking at all.

Goulart went on: “All I can tell you, pard, is that from where I'm standing? The abyss is awful abyssy. You know? Awful dark. And in all that dark, who the fuck knows? Right? Could be angels and demons playing checkers with our souls. Could be dirt and nothing all the way down.”

“What the hell is taking them so long with those tests of yours?” Zach blurted out, because he really did care about the New Yorker and wanted him to know it.

“Ah!” said Goulart and he waved the question away.

Once again Zach had to push down the thought that his partner was hiding something. Or that he knew more than he was telling. Or that the whole sickness story was a deception. Because if any of that was true—if any of his instincts and paranoid suspicions and weird feverish perceptions were accurate—then what about the rest of it? Those giant cockroaches? The executioner standing on the bridge? The corpse smoking a cigarette in his bedroom chair? And that night—in Germany—in the Black Forest. . . .

He had to be crazy, had to be. His mind had to be messed up by fever. There was no other reasonable explanation. But then how the hell was he supposed to be a cop—how the hell was he supposed to be a human being—if he could no longer trust his own observations? If he no longer knew what was real and what was madness?