From the Corner of His Eye

  fingers, palms, and wrists.

  …That discord sets up lots of other vibrations, some of which will return to you in ways you might expect…

  The vending machines were designed to accept quarters, not to eject them. They didn’t make change. Mechanically, this barrage wasn’t possible.

  …and some in ways you could never see coming….

  Two teenage boys and one elderly woman scrambled across the sidewalk, grabbing at the ringing rain of quarters. They caught some, but others bounced and twirled through their grasping fingers, rolling-spinning away into the gutter.

  …Of the things you couldn’t have seen coming, I’m the worst….

  In addition to these scavengers, another presence was here, unseen but not unfelt. The chill of this invisible entity pierced Junior to the marrow: the stubborn, vicious, psychotic, prickly-bur spirit of Thomas Vanadium, maniac cop, not satisfied to haunt the house in which he’d died, not ready yet to seek reincarnation, but instead pursuing his beleaguered suspect even after death, capering—to paraphrase Sklent—like an invisible, filthy, scabby monkey here on this city street, in bright daylight.

  Of the things you couldn’t have seen coming, I’m the worst.

  One of the coin seekers knocked against Junior, jarring him loose of his paralysis, but when he stumbled out of the line of fire of the second vending machine, a third machine shot quarters at him.

  Of the things you couldn’t have seen coming, I’m the worst…I’m the worst…I’m the worst….

  Mocked by the silvery ping-ting-jingle of the maniac detective emptying his ghostly pockets, Junior ran.

  Chapter 60

  KATHLEEN IN THE candlelight, her ginger eyes aglimmer with images of the amber flame. Icy martinis, extra olives in a shallow white dish. Beyond the tableside window, the legendary bay glimmered, too, darker and colder than Kathleen’s eyes, and not a fraction as deep.

  Nolly, telling the story of his day’s work, paused as the waiter delivered two orders of the crab-cake appetizer with mustard sauce. “Nolly, Mrs. Wulfstan—enjoy!”

  For the first few bites of crab in a light cornmeal crust, Nolly suspended their conversation. Bliss.

  Kathleen watched him with obvious amusement, aware that he was savoring her suspense as much as he was the appetizer.

  Piano music drifted into the restaurant from the adjacent bar, so soft and yet sprightly that it made the clink of silverware seem like music, too.

  At last he said, “And there he is, hands in front of his face, quarters bouncing off him, these kids and this old lady scrambling around him to snare some change.”

  Grinning, Kathleen said, “So the gimmick actually worked.”

  Nolly nodded. “Jimmy Gadget earned his money this time, for sure.”

  The subcontractor who built the quarter-spitting coin boxes was James Hunnicolt, but everyone called him Jimmy Gadget. He specialized in electronic eavesdropping, building cameras and recorders into the most unlikely objects, but he could do just about anything requiring inventive mechanical design and construction.

  “Couple quarters hit him in the teeth,” Nolly said.

  “I approve of anything that makes business for dentists.”

  “Wish I could describe his face. Frosty the Snowman was never that white. The surveillance van is parked right there, two spaces south of the vending machines—”

  “A real ringside view.”

  “So entertaining, I felt I should have paid for those seats. When the third machine starts whizzing coins at him, he bolts like a kid running a graveyard at midnight on a dare.” Nolly laughed, remembering.

  “More fun than divorce work, huh?”

  “You should’ve seen this, Kathleen. He’s dodging people on the sidewalk, shoving them out of his way when he can’t dodge them. Three long blocks, Jimmy and I watched the creep, till he turned the corner, three long blocks all uphill, and it’s a hill that would kill an Olympic athlete, but he doesn’t slow down once.”

  “Man had a ghost on his butt.”

  “I think he believed it.”

  “This is a crazy damn wonderful case,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Soon as Cain is out of sight, we yank up our tricky vending machines, then haul the real ones out of the van and bolt ’em down again. Slick, fast. People are still picking up quarters when we finish. And get this—they want to know where the camera is.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yeah, they think we’re with Candid Camera. So Jimmy points to this United Parcel truck parked across the street and says the cameras are in there.”

  She clapped her hands in delight.

  “When we pull away, people are waving across the street at the UPS truck, and the driver, he sees them, and he stands there, kind of confused, and then he waves back.”

  Nolly adored her laugh, so musical and girlish. He would have made all sorts of a fool out of himself, anytime, just to hear it.

  The busboy swept the empty appetizer plates away as the waiter arrived simultaneously with small salads. Fresh martinis followed.

  “Why do you think he’s spending his money for all this tricky stuff?” Kathleen wondered, not for the first time.

  “He says he has a moral responsibility.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve been thinking about that. If he feels some kind of responsibility…then why did he ever represent Cain in the first place?”

  “He’s an attorney, and this grieving husband comes to him with a big liability case. There’s money to be made.”

  “Even if he thinks maybe the wife was pushed?”

  Nolly shrugged. “He can’t know for sure. And anyway, he didn’t get the pushed idea until he’d already taken the case.”

  “Cain got millions. What was Simon’s fee?”

  “Twenty percent. Eight hundred fifty thousand bucks.”

  “Deduct what he paid you, he’s still close to eight big ones ahead.”

  “Simon’s a good man. Now that he pretty much knows Cain pushed the wife, he doesn’t feel better about representing him just because the payoff was big. And in the current case, he’s not Cain’s lawyer, so there’s no conflict of interest, no ethics problem, so he’s got a chance to set things right a little.”

  In January 1965, Magusson had sent Cain to Nolly as a client, not sure why the creep needed a private detective. That had turned out to be the business about Seraphim White’s baby. Simon’s warning to be careful of Enoch Cain had helped to shape Nolly’s decision to withhold the information about the child’s placement.

  Ten months later, Simon called again, also regarding Cain, but this time the attorney was the client, and Cain was the target. What Simon wanted Nolly to do was strange, to say the least, and it could be construed as harassment, but none of it was exactly illegal. And for two years, beginning with the quarter in the cheeseburger, ending with the coin-spitting machines, all of it had been great fun.

  “Well,” Kathleen said, “even if the money wasn’t so nice, I’d be sorry to see this case end.”

  “Me too. But it’s really not over till we meet the man.”

  “Two weeks to go. I’m not going to miss that. I’ve cleared all appointments off my calendar.”

  Nolly raised his martini glass in a toast. “To Kathleen Klerkle Wulfstan, dentist and associate detective.”

  She returned the toast: “To my Nolly, husband and best-ever boyfriend.”

  God, he loved her.

  “Veal fit for kings,” said their waiter, delivering the entrees, and one taste confirmed his promise.

  The glimmering bay and the shimmering amber candlelight provided the perfect atmosphere for the song that arose now from the piano in the bar.

  Although the piano was at some distance and the restaurant was a little noisy, Kathleen recognized the tune at once. She looked up from her veal, her eyes full of merriment.

  “By request,” he admitted. “I was hoping you’d sing.”

  Even in this soft light, Nolly could see
that she was blushing like a young girl. She glanced around at the nearby tables.

  “Considering that I’m your best-ever boyfriend and this is our song…”

  She raised her eyebrows at our song.

  Nolly said, “We’ve never really had a song of our own, in spite of all the dancing we do. I think this is a good one. But so far, you’ve only sung it to another man.”

  She put down her fork, glanced around the restaurant once more, and leaned across the table. Blushing brighter, she softly sang the opening lines of “Someone to Watch over Me.”

  An older woman at the next table said, “You’ve got a very lovely voice, dear.”

  Embarrassed, Kathleen stopped singing, but to the other woman, Nolly said, “It is a lovely voice, isn’t it? Haunting, I think.”

  Chapter 61

  NORTHBOUND ON THE coastal highway, headed for Newport Beach, Agnes saw bad omens, mile after mile.

  The verdant hills to the east lay like slumbering giants under blankets of winter grass, bright in the morning sun. But when the shadows of clouds sailed off the sea and gathered inland, the slopes darkened to a blackish green, as somber as shrouds, and a landscape that had appeared to be sleeping forms now looked dead and cold.

  Initially, the Pacific could not be seen beyond an opaque lens of fog. Yet later, when the mist retreated, the sea itself became a portent of sightlessness: Spread flat and colorless in the morning light, the glassy water reminded her of the depthless eyes of the blind, of that terrible sad vacancy where vision is denied.

  Barty had awakened able to read. On the page, lines of type no longer twisted under his gaze.

  While always Agnes held fast to hope, she knew that easy hope was usually false hope, and she didn’t allow herself to speculate, even briefly, that his problem had resolved itself. Other symptoms—halos and rainbows—had disappeared for a time, only to return.

  Agnes had read the last half of Red Planet to Barty just the previous night, but he brought the book with him, to read it again.

  Although, to her eyes, the natural world had an ominous cast this morning, she was also aware of its great beauty. She wanted Barty to store up every magnificent vista, every exquisite detail.

  Young boys, however, are not moved by scenery, especially not when their hearts are adventuring on Mars.

  Barty read aloud as Agnes drove, because she’d enjoyed the novel only from page 104. He wanted to share with her the exploits of Jim and Frank and their Martian companion, Willis.

  Though she worried that reading would strain his eyes, worsening his condition, she recognized the irrationality of her fear. Muscles don’t atrophy from use, nor eyes wear out from too much seeing.

  Through miles of worry, natural beauty, imagined omens, and the iron-red sands of Mars, they drove at last to Franklin Chan’s offices in Newport Beach.

  Short and slender, Dr. Chan was as self-effacing as a Buddhist monk, as confident and as gracious as a mandarin emperor. His manner was serene, and his effect was tranquility.

  For half an hour he studied Barty’s eyes with various devices and instruments. Thereafter, he arranged an immediate appointment with an oncologist, as Joshua Nunn had predicted.

  When Agnes pressed for a diagnosis, Dr. Chan quietly pleaded the need to gather more information. After Barty had seen the oncologist and had additional tests, he and his mother would return here in the afternoon to receive a diagnosis and counseling in treatment options.

  Agnes was grateful for the speed with which these arrangements were made, but she was also disturbed. Chan’s expeditious management of Barty’s case resulted in part from his friendship with Joshua, but an urgency arose, as well, during his examination of the boy, from a suspicion that he remained reluctant to put into words.

  Dr. Morley Schurr, the oncologist, who had offices in a building near Hoag Hospital, proved to be tall and portly, although otherwise much like Franklin Chan: kind, calm, and confident.

  Yet Agnes feared him, for reasons similar to those that might cause a superstitious primitive to tremble in the presence of a witch doctor. Although he was a healer, his dark knowledge of the mysteries of cancer seemed to give him godlike power; his judgment carried the force of fate, and his was the voice of destiny.

  After examining Barty, Dr. Schurr sent them to the hospital for further tests. There they spent the rest of the day, except for an hour break during which they ate lunch in a burger joint.

  Throughout lunch and, indeed, during his hours as an outpatient at the hospital, Barty gave no indication that he understood the gravity of his situation. He remained cheerful, charming the doctors and technicians with his sweet personality and precocious chatter.

  In the afternoon, Dr. Schurr came to the hospital to review test results and to reexamine Barty. When the early-winter twilight gave way to night, he sent them back to Dr. Chan, and Agnes didn’t press Schurr for an opinion. All day she’d been impatient for a diagnosis, but suddenly she was loath to have the facts put before her.

  On the short return trip to the ophthalmologist, Agnes crazily considered driving past Chan’s office building, cruising onward—ever onward—into the sparkling December night, not just back to Bright Beach, where the bad news would simply come by phone, but to places so far away that the diagnosis could never catch up to them, where the disease would remain unnamed and therefore would have no power over Barty.

  “Mommy, did you know, every day on Mars is thirty-seven minutes and twenty-seven seconds longer than ours?”

  “Funny, but none of my Martian friends ever mentioned it.”

  “Guess how many days in a Martian year.”

  “Well, it’s farther from the sun…”

  “One hundred forty million miles!”

  “So…four hundred days?”

  “Lots more. Six hundred eighty-seven. I’d like to live on Mars, wouldn’t you?”

  “Longer to wait between Christmases,” she said. “And between birthdays. I’d save a bunch of money on gifts.”

  “You’d never cheat me. I know you. We’d have Christmas twice a year and parties for half birthdays.”

  “You think I’m a pushover, huh?”

  “Nope. But you’re a real good mom.”

  As if he sensed her reluctance to return to Dr. Chan, Barty had kept her occupied with talk of the red planet as they approached the office building, had talked her off the street, along the driveway, and into a parking space, where finally she relinquished the fantasy of an endless road trip.

  At 5:45, long past the end of office hours, Dr. Chan’s suite was quiet.

  The receptionist, Rebecca, had stayed late, just to keep company with Barty in the waiting room. As she settled into a chair beside the boy, he asked her if she knew what gravity was on Mars, and when she confessed ignorance, he said, “Only thirty-seven percent what it is here. You can really jump on Mars.”

  Dr. Chan led Agnes to his private office, where he discreetly closed the door.

  Her hands shook, her entire body shook, and in her mind was a hard clatter of fear like the wheels of a roller coaster rattling over poorly seamed tracks.

  When the ophthalmologist saw her misery, his kind face softened further, and his pity became palpable.

  In that instant, she knew the dreadful shape of the future, if not its fine details.

  Instead of sitting behind his desk, he settled into the second of two patient chairs, beside her. This, too, indicated bad news.

  “Mrs. Lampion, in a case like this, I’ve found that the greatest mercy is directness. Your son has retinoblastoma. A malignancy of the retina.”

  Although she had acutely felt the loss of Joey during the past three years, she had never missed him as much as she missed him now. Marriage is an expression of love and respect and trust and faith in the future, but the union of husband and wife is also an alliance against the challenges and tragedies of life, a promise that with me in your corner, you will never stand alone.

  “The danger,” Dr. Chan
explained, “is that the cancer can spread from the eye to the orbit, then along the optic nerve to the brain.”

  Against the sight of Franklin Chan’s pity, which implied the hopelessness of Barty’s condition, Agnes closed her eyes. But she opened them at once, because this chosen darkness reminded her that unwanted darkness might be Barty’s fate.

  Her shaking threatened her composure. She was Barty’s mother and father, his only rock, and she must always be strong for him. She clenched her teeth and tensed her body and gradually quieted the tremors by an act of will.

  “Retinoblastoma is usually unilateral,” Dr. Chan continued, “occurring in one eye. Bartholomew has tumors in both.”

  The fact that Barty saw twisty spots with either eye closed had prepared Agnes for this bleak news. Yet in spite of the defense that foreknowledge provided her, the teeth of sorrow bit deep.

  “In cases like this, the malignancy is often more advanced in one eye than the other. If the size of the tumor requires it, we remove the eye containing the greatest malignancy, and we treat the remaining eye with radiation.”

  I have trusted in thy mercy, she thought desperately, reaching for comfort to Psalms 13:5.

  “Frequently, symptoms appear early enough that radiation therapy in one or both eyes has a chance to succeed. Sometimes strabismus—in which one eye diverges from the other, either inward toward the nose or outward toward the temple—can be an early sign, though more often we’re alerted when the patient reports problems with vision.”

  “Twisty spots.”

  Chan nodded. “Considering the advanced stage of Bartholomew’s malignancies, he should have complained earlier than he did.”

  “The symptoms come and go. Today, he can read.”

  “That’s unusual, too, and I wish the etiology of this disease, which is exceedingly well understood, gave us reason to hope based on the transience of the symptoms…but it doesn’t.”

  Be merciful unto me according to thy word.

  Few people will spend the greater part of their youth in school, struggling to obtain the education required for a medical specialty, unless they have a passion to heal. Franklin Chan was a healer, whose passion was the preservation of vision, and Agnes could see that his anguish, while a pale reflection of hers, was real and deeply felt.

  “The mass of these malignancies suggest they will soon spread—or have already spread—out of the eye to the orbit. There is no hope that radiation therapy will work in this instance, and no time to risk trying it even if there were hope. No time at all. No time. Dr. Schurr and I agree, to save Bartholomew’s life, we must remove both eyes immediately.”

  Here, four days past Christmas, after two days of torment, Agnes knew the worst, that her treasured son must go eyeless or die, must choose between blindness or cancer of the brain.

  She had expected horror, although perhaps not a horror quite as stark as this, and she had also expected to be crushed by it, destroyed, because although she was able to survive any misery that might be visited upon her, she didn’t think that she possessed the fortitude to endure the suffering of her innocent child. Yet she listened, and she received the terrible burden of the news, and her bones did not at once turn to dust, though unfeeling dust was what she now preferred to be.

  “Immediately,” she said. “What does that mean?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  She looked down at her clutched hands. Made for work, these hands, and always ready to take on any task. Strong, nimble, reliable hands, but useless to her