“Sorry to disappoint you, sir, but my thoughts weren’t running that deep. I just…I thought I saw someone I knew passing by.”
Raising the wineglass in his five-fingered hand, Ozzie said, “To the damnation of all miscreants.”
“That’s pretty strong, sir—damnation.”
“Don’t spoil my fun, lad. Just drink.”
Drinking, I glanced at the window again. Then I returned to the armchair where I had been seated before the cat hissed so alarmingly.
Ozzie settled down, as well, but his chair made a noisier issue of it than mine did.
I looked around at the books, at the wonderful reproductions of Tiffany lamps, but the room didn’t exert its usual calming influence. I could almost hear my wristwatch ticking off the seconds toward midnight and August 15.
“You’ve come here with a burden,” Ozzie said, “and since I don’t see a hostess gift, I assume the weight you carry is some trouble or other.”
I told him everything about Bob Robertson. Although I’d withheld the story of the black room from Chief Porter, I shared it with Ozzie because he has an imagination big enough to encompass anything.
In addition to his nonfiction books, he has written two highly successful series of mystery novels.
The first, as you might expect, is about a fat detective of incomparable brilliance who solves crimes while tossing off hilarious bon mots. He relies on his beautiful and highly athletic wife (who utterly adores him) to undertake all the investigative footwork and to perform all the derring-do.
Those books, Ozzie says, are based on certain hormone-drenched adolescent fantasies that preoccupied him throughout his teenage years. And still linger.
The second series involves a female detective who remains a likable heroine in spite of numerous neuroses and bulimia. This character had been conceived over a five-hour dinner during which Ozzie and his editor made less use of their forks than they made of their wineglasses.
Challenging Ozzie’s assertion that a fictional detective could have any personal problems or habits, however unpleasant, and still be a hit with the public as long as the author had the skill to make the character sympathetic, the editor had said, “No one could make a large audience want to read about a detective who stuck a finger down her throat and threw up after every meal.”
The first novel featuring such a detective won an Edgar Award, the mystery genre’s equivalent of an Oscar. The tenth book in the series had been recently published to greater sales than any of the previous nine.
In solemn tones that fail to disguise his impish glee, Ozzie says that no novels in the history of literature have featured so much vomiting to the delight of so many readers.
Ozzie’s success doesn’t in the least surprise me. He likes people and he listens to them, and that love of humanity shines out of his pages.
When I finished telling him about Robertson, the black room, and the file cabinets packed with thick case histories of homicidal maniacs, he said, “Odd, I wish you would get a gun.”
“Guns scare me,” I reminded him.
“Your life scares me. I’m certain Wyatt Porter would issue you a permit to carry a concealed weapon.”
“Then I’d have to wear a sports jacket.”
“You could switch to Hawaiian shirts, carry the gun in a belt holster in the small of your back.”
I frowned. “Hawaiian shirts are just not me.”
“Oh, yes,” he said with undisguised sarcasm, “your T-shirts and jeans are such a unique fashion statement.”
“Sometimes I wear chinos.”
“The depth of your wardrobe dazzles the mind. Ralph Lauren weeps.”
I shrugged. “I am who I am.”
“If I purchase a suitable weapon for you and personally instruct you in its use—”
“Thank you, sir, for your concern, but for sure I’d shoot off both my feet, and the next thing I knew, you’d be writing a series about a footless private investigator.”
“It’s already been done.” He sipped his wine. “Everything’s already been done. Only once in a generation does anything as fresh as a vomiting detective come along.”
“There’s still chronic diarrhea.”
He grimaced. “I’m afraid you haven’t the knack to be a popular mystery novelist. What have you been writing lately?”
“This and that.”
“Assuming ‘this’ refers to grocery-shopping lists and ‘that’ refers to mash notes to Stormy Llewellyn, what else have you been writing?”
“Nothing,” I admitted.
When I was sixteen, P. Oswald Boone, then a mere 350 pounds, agreed to judge a writing contest at our high school, from which he himself had graduated some years earlier. My English teacher required each of her students to submit an entry to the contest.
Because my Granny Sugars had only recently died and because I’d been missing her, I wrote a piece about her. Unfortunately, it won first prize, making of me a minor celebrity in high school, though I preferred to keep a low profile.
For my memories of Granny, I received three hundred dollars and a plaque. I spent the money on an inexpensive but quite listenable music system.
The plaque and the music system were later smashed to bits by an angry poltergeist.
The only long-term consequence of that writing contest had been my friendship with Little Ozzie, for which I was grateful, although for five years he had harassed me to write, write, write. He said that such a talent was a gift and that I had a moral obligation to use it.
“Two gifts are one too many,” I told him now. “If I had to deal with the dead and also write something worthwhile, I’d either go stark raving mad or shoot myself in the head with that gun you want to give me.”
Impatient with my excuses, he said, “Writing isn’t a source of pain. It’s psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.”
I didn’t doubt either that this was true for him or that he had enough pain to require a lifetime of psychic chemotherapy.
Although Big Ozzie was still alive, Little Ozzie saw his father only once or twice a year. On each occasion, he required two weeks to recover his emotional equilibrium and trademark good humor.
His mother was alive, too. Little Ozzie hadn’t spoken to her in twenty years.
Big Ozzie currently weighed, at a guess, only fifty pounds less than his son. Consequently, most people assumed that Little Ozzie had inherited his obesity.
Little Ozzie, however, refused to portray himself as a victim of his genetics. He said that at the heart of him was a weakness of will that resulted in his immensity.
Over the years, he sometimes implied and I frequently inferred that his parents had broken a part of his heart that resulted in this mortal weakness of will. He never spoke of his difficult childhood, however, and refused to describe what he had endured. He just wrote mystery novel after mystery novel….
He didn’t speak of his folks with bitterness. Instead, he spoke of them hardly at all and avoided them as best he could—and wrote book after book about art, music, food, and wine….
“Writing,” I told him now, “can’t relieve my pain as much as it’s relieved by the sight of Stormy…or by the taste of coconut cherry chocolate chunk ice cream, for that matter.”
“I have no Stormy in my life,” he replied, “but I can understand the ice cream.” He finished his wine. “What are you going to do about this Bob Robertson?”
I shrugged.
Ozzie pressed me: “You’ve got to do something if he knows that you were in his house this afternoon and already he’s following you around.”
“All I can do is be careful. And wait for Chief Porter to get something on him. Anyway, maybe he wasn’t actually following me. Maybe he heard about your exploding cow and stopped by to gawk at the ruins.”
“Odd, I would be indescribably disappointed if, having not yet employed your writing gift to any useful purpose, you wound up dead tomorrow.”
“
Just think how I’d feel.”
“I might wish that you’d grow wiser faster, get a gun and write a book, but I won’t wish anyone’s life away for him. ‘How swift are the feet of the days of the years of youth.’”
Giving attribution to the quote, I said, “Mark Twain.”
“Excellent! Perhaps you aren’t a willfully ignorant young fool, after all.”
“You used that quote once before,” I admitted. “That’s how I know it.”
“But at least you remembered! I believe this reveals in you a desire, even if unconscious, to give up the griddle and make yourself a man of literature.”
“I expect I’ll switch to tires first.”
He sighed. “You’re a tribulation sometimes.” He rang his empty wineglass with one fingernail. “I should’ve brought the bottle.”
“Sit still. I’ll get it,” I said, for I could fetch the Cabernet from the kitchen in the time that he would require merely to lever himself up from his armchair.
The ten-foot-wide hallway served as a gallery for fine art, and opening off both sides of it were rooms rich with still more art and books.
At the end of the hall lay the kitchen. On a black-granite counter stood the bottle, uncorked to let the wine breathe.
Although the front rooms had been comfortably air-conditioned, the kitchen proved to be surprisingly warm. Entering, I thought for an instant that all four ovens must be filled with baking treats.
Then I saw that the back door stood open. The desert evening, still broiling in the stubborn summer sun, had sucked the coolness from the kitchen.
When I stepped to the door to close it, I saw Bob Robertson in the backyard, as pale and fungoid as ever he had looked.
SEVENTEEN
ROBERTSON STOOD FACING THE HOUSE, AS though waiting for me to see him. Then he turned and walked toward the back of the property.
For too long, I hesitated in the doorway, uncertain what I should do.
I assumed that one of his neighbors might have recognized me and might have told him that earlier I’d been snooping around during his absence. But the swiftness with which he’d tracked me down and had begun to tail me was disconcerting.
My paralysis broke with the realization that I had endangered Ozzie, had led this psychopath to his house. I left the kitchen, crossed the porch, descended the steps to a patio, stepped onto the lawn, and went after Robertson.
Ozzie’s house sits at the front of his one-acre lot, and most of the property is given over to lawn and to trees that screen him from his neighbors. In the back half of the acre, the trees grow thicker than at the front, and stand close enough to qualify as a small woods.
Into this copse of laurel, podocarpus, and California pepper, Robertson strode—and disappeared from view.
The westward-dawdling sun slanted between the trees where it could find narrow gaps, but for the most part the layered branches successfully resisted it. Cooler than the sun-baked lawn, these greenery-scented shadows were nevertheless warm, and they pressed against me in stifling folds.
No less than the cloying shadows, the trunks of the many trees offered concealment. My quarry made good use of them.
I tacked quickly but warily through the woods, north to south, then south to north, first in silence, then calling his name—“Mr. Robertson?”—but he didn’t answer.
The few intruding flares of sunlight inhibited rather than assisted the search. They illuminated little but were just numerous enough to prevent my eyes from adjusting well to the gloom.
Afraid of leaving the woods unsearched and therefore giving Robertson a chance to creep in behind me, I took too long to get to the gate in the back fence. I found it closed, but it was held by a gravity latch that would have engaged automatically when it fell shut behind him.
The gate opened into a picturesque brick-paved alleyway, flanked by back fences and garages, shaded here and there by queen palms and willowy pepper trees. Neither Bob Robertson nor anyone else was afoot as far as I could see in either direction.
Returning through the woodlet, I half expected him to lunge at me, not gone after all but waiting to catch me with my guard down. If Robertson was hiding in that grove, he must have recognized that I remained alert, for he didn’t risk an assault.
When I reached the back porch, I stopped, turned, and studied the pocket forest. Birds flew from those branches, not as if chased out by anything, but only as if taking a last flight before sunset.
In the kitchen again, I closed the door. I engaged the deadbolt lock. And the security chain.
I peered through the windowpanes in the upper half of the door. Peaceful, the woods. And still.
When I returned to the living room with the bottle of Cabernet, half the cheese had disappeared from the canape plate, and Little Ozzie was still ensconced in his commodious chair, where he himself had once said that he looked as cozy as the Toad King on his throne. “Dear Odd, I was beginning to think you’d stepped through a wardrobe into Narnia.”
I told him about Robertson.
“You mean,” Ozzie said, “that he was here, in my house?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said as I refilled his wineglass.
“Doing what?”
“Probably standing in the hall, just beyond that archway, listening to us talk.”
“That’s damn bold.”
Setting the bottle on a coaster beside his glass, striving hard to repress the palsy of fear that would have trembled my hands, I said, “No more bold than I was when I slipped into his house to poke through his drawers.”
“I suppose not. But then you’re on the side of the gods, and this bastard sounds like a giant albino cockroach on a day pass from Hell.”
Terrible Chester had moved from the windowsill to my chair. He raised his head to challenge me for possession of the seat. His eyes are as green as those of a scheming demon.
“If I were you,” Ozzie advised, “I would sit elsewhere.” He indicated the bottle of wine. “Won’t you have a second glass?”
“Haven’t quite finished my first,” I said, “and I’ve really got to be going. Stormy Llewellyn, dinner—all of that. But don’t get up.”
“Don’t tell me not to get up,” he grumped as he began the process of disengaging his bulk from armchair cushions that, like the hungry jaws of an exotic flesh-eating plant, had closed with considerable suction around his thighs and buttocks.
“Sir, it’s really not necessary.”
“Don’t tell me what’s necessary, you presumptuous pup. What’s necessary is whatever I wish to do, regardless of how unnecessary it might seem.”
Sometimes when he gets up after having been seated for a while, his complexion reddens with the effort, and at other times he goes sheet-white. I’m frightened to think that such a simple thing as rising from a chair should tax him so much.
Fortunately, his face neither flushed nor paled this time. Perhaps fortified by the wine and burdened by only half a plate of cheese, he was on his feet markedly faster than a desert tortoise extracting itself from a dry slough of treacherous sand.
“Now that you’re up,” I said, “I think you should lock the door behind me. And keep all the doors locked till this thing is resolved. Don’t answer the bell unless you can see who rang it.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” Ozzie declared. “My well-padded vital organs are hard to reach with either blade or bullet. And I know a few things about self-defense.”
“He’s dangerous, sir. He might have controlled himself so far, but when he cracks, he’ll be so vicious that he’ll make the evening news from Paris to Japan. I’m scared of him.”
Ozzie dismissed my concern with a wave of his six-fingered hand. “Unlike you, I’ve got a gun. More than one.”
“Start keeping them handy. I’m so sorry to have drawn him here.”
“Nonsense. He was just something stuck to your shoe that you didn’t know was there.”
Each time that I leave this house after a visit, Ozzie hugs me as a
father hugs a beloved son, as neither of us was ever hugged by his father.
And every time, I am surprised that he seems so fragile in spite of his formidable bulk. It’s as if I can feel a shockingly thin Ozzie within the mantles of fat, an Ozzie who is being steadily crushed by the layers that life has troweled upon him.
Standing at the open front door, he said, “Give Stormy a kiss for me.”
“I will.”
“And bring her around to bear witness to my beautiful exploded cow and the villainy it represents.”
“She’ll be appalled. She’ll need wine. We’ll bring a bottle.”
“No need. I have a full cellar.”
I waited on the porch until he closed the door and until I heard the deadbolt being engaged.
As I negotiated the cow-strewn front walk and then rounded the Mustang to the driver’s door, I surveyed the quiet street. Neither Robertson nor his dusty Ford Explorer was to be seen.
In the car, when I switched on the engine, I suddenly expected to be blown up like the Holstein. I was too jumpy.
I followed a twisty route from Jack Flats to St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church in the historical district, giving a tail plenty of opportunities to reveal himself. All the traffic behind me seemed to be innocent of the intent to pursue. Yet I felt watched.
EIGHTEEN
PICO MUNDO IS NOT A SKYSCRAPER TOWN. The recent construction of a five-story apartment building made longtime residents dizzy with an unwanted sense of metropolitan crowding and led to editorials in the Maravilla County Times that used phrases like “high-rise blight,” and worried about a future of “heartless canyons of bleak design, in which people are reduced to the status of drones in a hive, and into which the sun never fully reaches.”
The Mojave sun is not a timid little Boston sun or even a don’t-worry-be-happy Caribbean sun. The Mojave sun is a fierce, aggressive beast that isn’t going to be intimidated by the shadows of five-story apartment buildings.
Counting its tower and the spire that sits atop the tower, St. Bartholomew’s Church is by far the tallest structure in Pico Mundo. Sometimes at twilight, under the barrel-tile roofs, the white stucco walls glow like the panes in a storm lantern.