Winter Tides (39 page)

E
DMUND’S ROOM AT THE
M
T.
P
LEASANT
M
OTOR
H
OTEL
on Beach Boulevard was only a block down from Right Now Notary. It had obviously been furnished twenty or thirty years ago. The rust-orange shag carpet had been vacuumed, but the vacuuming hadn’t helped, and the seascape painting on the wall was straight out of a thrift store. When he had arrived two mornings ago, he had moved the painting into the closet and then had slid the dresser aside in order to expose the white-painted wall. The fleabag rooms were semidetached and rentable by the month—not the sort of place a tourist would check into. Unlike an authentic motel, there were no maids wheeling carts up and down outside the room, and he had made it clear to the management that he didn’t want to be disturbed. Best of all, the Mt. Pleasant was a place where tenants had long ago put a lid on their curiosity. His relationship with the Night Girl was stronger than
ever since he had dealt with Mayhew and Mifflin, and what he needed now was to be left alone with her when he chose to be alone. He had been fairly successful in capturing her image on film, although the results were shadowy and indistinct. He had read that primitive people feared that a photograph would steal a man’s soul, and he was convinced that under the right conditions there might be a certain truth in the idea. Voodoo priests, certainly, saw a similar magic in a photographic image and the image represented by a cloth doll. A photograph of the Night Girl, at the very least, demonstrated that something increasingly permanent had come into existence at his bidding. And yet she was still merely a figment of his passions. Something prevented her from being fully realized, from having existence beyond his own desires, and he knew what that something was.

The Day Girl and the Night Girl were meant to be one, not two. Anne’s stubborn attachment to the Day Girl persona was a closed door. What to do to open that door, or simply to obliterate it: that was the very interesting problem.

In the time since his return from Mexico he’d had a vague sense of impending trouble. There was something in the air, and he had sensed it right away when he had passed into Orange County. The elevated mood provided by his successes with Mayhew and Mifflin had evaporated like the foggy spring weather. He felt slightly edgy now, and he found himself constantly checking the street past the heavy window curtains, half expecting to see a police car slowing down to turn into the tree-shaded lot. What he wanted now was a clarity of focus, but despite reading and meditation, he couldn’t quite maintain it.

He also wanted to clean out the condo, especially to dismantle the darkroom and retrieve the stuff from the library. That was something he should have done before driving down to Mexico. He found these days that he quickly lost interest in his own films and photos; the thrill was in the
process
, as it was for any artist; and when the process was complete, his eyes were on the next piece, figuratively speaking. His collected work, like the work of any artist, was meant to affect an audience, but as the creator of a
piece, he couldn’t also be an audience to it. One way or another, he shouldn’t have left the films lying around in his apartment. It was simply incriminating, and the sooner he found a market for them, the better. The next couple of days were going to be busy.

He gathered up the odds and ends on the table in order to put them into the trunk of his rented car: an extension cord, a cheap plastic drop cloth, a ten-dollar lamp timer from the dime store, a light-bulb socket with a cord, and a hundred-watt bulb with a hole punched into the top of it to expose the intact filament, which would heat up to over a thousand degrees when the bulb was screwed into the socket and plugged in. All together the cheap collection would make a simple incendiary timer, and out of that simplicity would come a complication of priceless results.

When he left the room, locking the door behind him, it was still two hours before dawn.

A
FTER TWO DAYS OF CLEAR, WINDBLOWN SKIES, THE
warm inland temperatures drew moisture in off the ocean again, and the coast was once more gray with fog in the early-morning darkness. Edmund was forced to follow closely behind Casey’s truck, south through Surf side and into Sunset Beach, keeping the old bullet-shaped tail lights in view. When the truck angled toward the edge of the Highway and slowed down, Edmund turned left and circled the block, parking on 23rd Street where he could see, dimly through the fog, the front end of the parked truck. There was an Arco station open on the corner, and a motorist stood at the pumps. Another drove into the lot now and got out of his car, heading in to pay in advance for his gas.

This spot was
way
too busy, Edmund told himself, no place to kill your brother. He laughed a little bit, hunkering down in the seat, eating almonds out of a Baggie and waiting for Casey to come back. His brother’s early-morning routine was Virtually always the same: three or four predawn stops to check out the surf along the several miles of beach break between Seal Beach and Newport, and then straight back to whatever beach looked good to him.

Casey reappeared from between two rows of apartment houses. He climbed straight back into the truck and fired up the engine, then rolled away again, south toward Huntington, and Edmund let him get far out of sight before swinging away from the curb and following. He reached over and repositioned the video camera on the passenger seat, making sure again that it hadn’t shut itself off.

It had first dawned on him down in Mexico that Casey was the problem. Casey had
always
been the problem. His hatred of his little brother was the first thing he remembered about childhood. He couldn’t pin that hatred on any particular incident, either. It seemed to have no reason except the existence of Casey himself, and yet it was a very
real
hatred, an authentic hatred, not something that Edmund had made up out of jealousy or some other petty emotion. After all, there was nothing about Casey to be jealous about.

He spotted the truck’s taillights ahead at an intersection, and he pulled over to wait again. If Casey recognized him, the morning would be wasted. Perhaps if his brother had amounted to something, if he had made any effort at all to carry his own weight, things would have been different. But Casey had never made any such effort. He had adapted perfectly to some kind of moron sixties hippie surfer philosophy, and had spent his life playing while other people worked. He was an uneducated bum, just as much as May-hew had been a bum—a waste of the life force, a drain of cosmic energy like a leaky toilet. Somewhere Edmund had heard that a toilet can leak thousands of gallons of precious water a year, one drop at a time. Multiply that by thousands of leaky toilets, and you could fill a reservoir.

Last night Casey had called him on the telephone! He had asked Edmund to “back off” on Collier and to give Anne “some space.” Not only had Edmund held onto his temper, he had agreed wholeheartedly. Yes, indeed. He had pretended to be schooled by his little brother, his infantile, no account, do-nothing, beach bum little brother, who obviously was parroting something that he’d heard from Dave the lionheart, the proud bird with the golden hammer. “Lots of leaky toilets,” Edmund muttered. Giving
him
advice! This morning he was going after one of those leaks with his plumber’s helpers: a gallon of alcohol and a hell of a big spark. Lately he had extended his study of the fine art of fire, and he was anxious to witness the visual effect of the cool blue flame of burning alcohol….

He slowed down when he passed Goldenwest Street, since Casey nearly always stopped for a wave check north of the pier. Sure enough, there was the truck, parked along the side of the Highway. Edmund moved into the left lane and drove on past, turned left at 7th Street, and pulled into the liquor store parking lot, where he cut his lights and waited, letting the engine idle. There were no other cars parked at the curb, but with dawn approaching, there soon would be. Next stop was Magnolia Street, where Casey would pull off into the turnaround by the lifeguard headquarters—no place to commit a murder. After that he’d either turn around or head south to Newport; either way it would be too late for any action. It was now or never.

He watched his brother get out of the truck and walk past the parking meter and across the grass toward the ocean. Because of the fog and the darkness, he would have to climb the stairs to the beach and walk nearly to the water’s edge to check the waves, which ought to give Edmund plenty of time. He shut off the engine and climbed out of the car, wearing a pair of surgical gloves and carrying a gas can and a nearly empty vodka bottle—a quart that he’d bought two days ago at the supermarket. He had poured it into the empty gas can along with a second quart of vodka, then topped the can off with a half gallon of pure ethanol.

Predictably, his brother left his surfboard in the bed of the truck. If he decided to stay and surf, he’d return for his board and wetsuit, and the truck would sit here on the roadside for the next three or four hours. The alcohol would evaporate, and Edmund’s plan would remain merely a good idea.

But if Casey decided to drive on, to check out one more spot …

Edmund loped across the empty Highway, carrying the gas can, which he set on the curb in front of the truck. Then, hurriedly, he followed the path his brother had taken to the stairs. There was no sign of him. Obviously he had gone on down to the beach. Edmund returned to the truck and raised the hood, then leaned in underneath and found the distributor cap and the wire that ran from the distributor to the coil, just like in the photo illustration from the repair manual that he’d bought at Pep Boys. He gripped the wire at its base, tugged and wiggled it halfway out of the coil, and then sloshed vodka and alcohol on it out of the can, pooling up the alcohol on the manifold. He splashed the liquid everywhere over the engine, dumping it through the open cable holes in the firewall. Then he shut the hood carefully, leaning hard on it to latch it. He spent five seconds listening hard for the slap of Casey’s bare feet on the stairs, but he heard nothing but the sound of the ocean and the rumble of a car as it passed.

He dumped alcohol on the hood for good measure, pouring it along the base of the windshield. The fog was with him once again: the dewy truck would mask the wetness of the alcohol, and the alcohol, of course, would burn even when it was diluted with water. He opened the driver’s side door, lifted the beach towel that covered the torn seat upholstery, and soaked the exposed foam seat cushion. He splashed it on the door panel and poured it under the wet-suit and the trash that littered the floor, splashing more across the top of the trash before flicking liquid up under the dash. He emptied the rest of the can, finally, shaking out the last drops, then shoved the vodka bottle back underneath the seat where his brother wouldn’t see it when he climbed in. He shut the door carefully, and without a backward glance ran back across the highway, opened the trunk of his car and tossed in the gas can and the gloves,
and then climbed into his car again, where he waited with the engine running.

He took a deep breath and settled down for the show. It would be safer to drive away, of course. But he
had
to watch it happen; he had to get it on film, the only permanent record of performance art. He pictured his brother climbing into the car, cranking the engine, the first creeping blue alcohol flames when the spark from the half-disengaged coil wire ignited the fuel….

“A surefire thing,” Edmund muttered in a cowpoke accent, then laughed at his own joke. The whole thing had been
perfect
. Casey had set himself up with his piglike truck knee-deep in garbage. The old broken-down seats and the wetsuit and the trash could have soaked up
two
gallons of alcohol, just like Casey himself. A man’s car was an absolute reflection of his personality, after all, and …

Casey appeared right then, a shadow in the fog. He came straight around the front of the truck, opened the door, and stood for a moment in the street as if he were making up his mind about something. He looked at his watch.
Get in
, Edmund commanded silently, and abruptly Casey
did
get in. Edmund heard the old engine roar into life, and he half expected a big whoosh of flame, the truck going up like a funeral pyre.

Nothing apparently happened. Casey sat there for a moment or two with the engine idling, looking through the windshield at the fog. Then the truck moved slowly forward. Edmund prepared to follow him. He put one hand on the video camera, switching it on, and drove out toward the street, watching the truck pick up speed. He couldn’t afford to fall behind now, not if he wanted this on film.

He saw something now! Flames, flickering up along the rear edge of the hood, dancing blue flames in a skirt along the base of the window. “Yes,” he muttered, slapping his hand against the steering wheel. “Burn.” The truck accelerated, heading south, and Edmund followed, running the light at 7th and looping around behind the truck, which was swerving erratically now, fifty yards ahead. Edmund grappled one-handed with the video camera, pressing the record button and steadying it against the dashboard.

There was fire inside the cab now, not the blue of an alcohol fire, but the yellow flames of the trash going up, the seat cushions burning. A reek of black smoke poured out of the rolled-down window, and the truck veered sharply across two lanes, angled across the intersection at Main, jumped the curb and sidewalk, and crashed into a stand of queen palms in front of Maxwell’s, the old boarded-up pierside restaurant. The truck stopped dead, and both doors flew open with the impact.

Edmund slowed way down, craning his neck, desperate to see what would happen, aiming the camera as well as he could, but still moving. He whooped out loud, the sound of his voice mingling with the sudden howl of a police siren, right behind him. Shocked by the siren, he dropped the camera to the seat and looked into the rearview mirror, which reflected the flashing blue lights of a patrol car. He accelerated—not running, but as if anxious to get out of the way.