“Coming from a Satanist,” Corky said with a smile, “that could be taken as a compliment.”
“It’s not meant as one,” Roman replied impatiently, angrily.
At his best, groomed and togged and breath-freshened for serious socializing, Castevet was an unattractive man. Anger made him uglier than usual.
Slat-thin, all bony hips and elbows and sharp shoulders, with an Adam’s apple more prominent than his nose and with a nose sharper than any Corky had ever seen on another member of the human species, with gaunt cheeks and with a fleshless chin that resembled the knob of a femur, Roman appeared to have a serious eating disorder.
Every time that he met Castevet’s bird-keen, reptile-intense eyes, however, and whenever he caught the pathologist, for no apparent reason, sensuously licking his lips, which were the only ripe feature of that scarecrow face and form, Corky suspected that a fearsome erotic need spun the wheels of the man’s metabolism almost fast enough to cause smoke to issue from various orifices. Had there been a betting pool regarding the average number of calories that Roman burned up every day in obsessive self-abuse alone, Corky would have wagered heavily on at least three thousand—and he would no doubt have ensured a comfortable retirement with his winnings.
“Well, whatever you think of me,” Corky said, “nevertheless, I would like to place an order for another ten foreskins.”
“Hey, get it through your head—I’m not doing business with you anymore. You’re reckless, coming here like this.”
Partly as a profitable sideline, but also partly from a sense of religious duty and as an expression of his abiding faith in the King of Hell, Roman Castevet provided—only from cadavers—selected body parts, internal organs, blood, malignant tumors, occasionally even entire brains to other Satanists. His customers, other than Corky, had both a theological and a practical interest in arcane rituals designed to petition His Satanic Majesty for special favors or to summon actual demons out of the fiery pit. Frequently, after all, the most essential ingredients in a black-magic formula could not be purchased at the nearest Wal-Mart.
“You’re overreacting,” Corky said.
“I’m not overreacting. You’re imprudent, you’re foolhardy.”
“Foolhardy?” Corky smiled, nearly laughed. “All of a sudden you seem awfully prissy for a man who believes plunder, torture, rape, and murder will be rewarded in the afterlife.”
“Lower your voice,” Roman demanded in a fierce whisper, though Corky had continued to speak in a pleasant conversational tone. “If somebody finds you here with me, it could mean my job.”
“Not at all. I’m a visiting pathologist from Indianapolis, and we’re discussing your current manpower shortage and this deplorable backlog of unidentified cadavers.”
“You’ll ruin me,” Roman moaned.
“All I’ve come here to do,” Corky lied, “is to order ten more foreskins. I don’t expect you to collect them while I wait. I just placed the order in person because I thought it would give you a chuckle.”
Although Roman Castevet appeared too emaciated, too juiceless to produce tears, his feverish black eyes grew watery with frustration.
“Anyway,” Corky continued, “there’s a bigger threat to your job than being caught here with me—if someone discovers you people have mistakenly penned up a living man in this place with all these dead bodies.”
“Are you wired on something?”
“I already told you on the phone, a few minutes ago. One of these unfortunate souls is still alive.”
“What kind of mind game is this?” Roman demanded.
“It’s not a game. It’s true. I heard him murmuring ‘Help me, help me,’ so soft, barely loud enough to hear.”
“Heard who?”
“I tracked him down, peeled the shroud back from his face. He’s paralyzed. Facial muscles distorted by a stroke.”
Hunching closer, bristling like the collection of dry sticks in a bindle of kindling, Roman insisted on eye-to-eye conversation, as if he believed the fierceness of his gaze would convey the message that his words had failed to deliver.
Corky blithely continued: “The poor guy was probably comatose when they brought him in here, then he regained consciousness. But he’s awfully weak.”
A crack of uncertainty breached Roman Castevet’s armor of disbelief. He broke eye contact and swept the bunks with his gaze. “Who?”
“Over there,” Corky said brightly, indicating the back of the vault, where the light from the overhead fixture barely reached, leaving the recumbent dead shrouded in gloom as well as in white cotton cloth. “Seems to me I’m saving all your jobs by alerting you to this, so you ought to fill my order for free, out of gratitude.”
Moving toward the back of the vault, Roman said, “Which one?”
Stepping close behind the pathologist, Corky replied, “On the left, the second from the bottom.”
As Roman bent to peel the shroud off the face of the corpse, Corky raised his right arm, revealing the hand that until now had been concealed in the sleeve of his yellow slicker, and the ice pick in the hand. With judicious aim, great force, and utter confidence, he drove the weapon into the pathologist’s back.
Placed with precision, an ice pick can penetrate atriums and ventricles, causing such a convulsive shock in cardiac muscle that the heart stops in an instant and forever.
With a rustle of clothes and a quiet knockety-knock of folding limbs, Roman Castevet collapsed without a cry to the floor.
Corky didn’t need to check for a pulse. The gaping mouth, from which no breath escaped, and the eyes, as fixed as the glass orbs in a fine work of taxidermy, confirmed the perfection of his aim.
Preparation paid off. At home, using this same ice pick, Corky had practiced on a CPR dummy that he had stolen from the university medical school.
If he’d needed to stab twice, three, four times, or if Roman’s heart had continued to pump for even a short while, the assault could have proved messy. For that reason, he’d worn the stainproof slicker.
In the unlikely event that one of the vault’s properly chilled treasures sprung an unfortunate leak, the tile floor featured a large drain. Near the door, a collapsible vinyl hose on a reel was attached to a wall spigot.
Corky knew about this janitorial equipment from the articles that he had read two years ago, when the rat scandal had made the front page. Happily, he didn’t need the hose.
He lifted Roman into one of the empty bunks along the back wall of the vault, where the shadows served his scheme.
From a deep inner pocket of his slicker, he withdrew the sheet that earlier he’d purchased in a department store at the mall. He draped the sheet over Roman, being careful to cover him entirely, for he needed to conceal both the identity of the corpse and the fact that, unlike the others here, it was fully clothed.
Because death had been instantaneous and the wound had been minute, no blood seeped forth to stain the sheet and thus call attention to the freshness of this carcass.
In a day or two, or three, Roman would most likely be found by a morgue employee taking inventory or withdrawing a cadaver for an overdue autopsy. Another frontpage story for the medical examiner.
Corky regretted having to kill a man like Roman Castevet. As a good Satanist and a committed anarchist, the pathologist had served well in the campaign to destabilize the social order and hasten its collapse.
Soon, however, ghastly events at Channing Manheim’s estate would make big headlines worldwide. Authorities would commit extraordinary resources to discover the identity of the man who’d sent the taunting gifts in the black boxes.
Logic would send them to private mortuaries and public morgues, in search of the source of the ten foreskins. If Roman had come under suspicion during that investigation, he would have tried to save his own hide by fingering Corky.
Anarchists labored under no obligation of loyalty to one another, which was as it should be among champions of disorder.
Indeed, Corky
had other loose ends to tie up before the yuletide celebrations could begin.
Considering that his hands were sheathed in latex gloves, which had been hidden from his victim in the roomy sleeves of his slicker, he could have left the ice pick in the vault without worrying that he might provide police with incriminating fingerprints. Instead, he returned it to its sheath and then to a pocket not only because it might serve him well again, but also because it now had sentimental value.
Leaving the morgue, he said a friendly good-bye to the night security men. They had a thankless job, protecting the dead from the living. He even paused long enough to share with them an obscene joke about an attorney and a chicken.
He had no fear that eventually they would be able to provide the police with a useful description of his face. In his droopy hat and tentlike slicker, he was an eccentric and amusing figure about whom no one would remember more than his costume.
Later, in a fireplace at home, while he enjoyed a brandy, he would burn all the ID that had established him as a pathologist from Indianapolis. He possessed numerous additional sets of documentation for other identities if and when he needed them.
Now he returned to the night, the rain.
And so the time had come to deal with Rolf Reynerd, who by his actions had shown himself to be every bit as unfit for life as he had proved to be unfit for soap-opera stardom.
CHAPTER 27
IF AELFRIC MANHEIM’S MONDAY-EVENING DINNER had been reported upon in Daily Variety, the colorful trade paper of the film industry, the headline might have been FRIC CLICKS WITH CHICK.
On the grill, the plump breast had been basted with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt, pepper, and a delicious mixture of exotic herbs known around Palazzo Rospo as the McBee McSecret. In addition to the chicken, he had been served pasta, not with tomato sauce, but with butter, basil, pine nuts, and Parmesan cheese.
Mr. Hachette, the Cordon Bleu-trained chef who was a direct descendent of Jack the Ripper, didn’t work Sundays and Mondays, so that he might stalk and slash innocent women, toss rabid cats into baby carriages, and indulge in whatever other personal interests currently appealed to him.
Mr. Baptiste, the happy cook, was off Mondays and Tuesdays; therefore, on Mondays the kitchen was, in show-biz lingo, dark. Mrs. McBee had prepared these delicacies herself.
By the softly pulsing light of electric fixtures tricked up to look like antique oil lamps, Fric ate in the wine cellar, alone at the refectory table for eight in the cozy tasting room, which was separated from the temperature-controlled portion of the cellar by a glass wall. Beyond the glass, in aisles of shelves, were fourteen thousand bottles of what his father sometimes identified as “Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, claret, port, Burgundy—and the blood of critics, which is a bitter vintage.”
Ha, ha, ha.
When Ghost Dad was home, they usually ate in the dining room, unless the dinner guests—the old man’s buddies, business associates, or various personal advisers from his spiritual counselor to his clairvoyance instructor—felt uncomfortable having a ten-year-old kid listening to their gossip and rolling his eyes at their trash talk.
In Ghost Dad’s absence, which was most of the time, Fric could choose to have dinner not just in his private rooms, where he usually ate, but virtually anywhere on the estate.
In good weather, he might dine outdoors by the swimming pool, grateful that in his father’s absence no hopelessly dense, tiresomely giggly, embarrassingly half-naked starlets were there to pester him with questions about his favorite subject in school, his favorite food, his favorite color, his favorite world-famous movie star.
They were always trying to cadge some Ritalin or antidepressants from Fric. They refused to believe that his only prescription was for asthma medication.
If not by the pool, he might dine dangerously with fine china and antique silverware at a table in the rose garden, keeping his inhaler ready on a dessert plate in the event that a breeze stirred up enough pollen to trigger an asthma attack.
Sometimes he ate from a lap tray while ensconced in one of the sixty comfortable armchairs in the screening room, which had recently been remodeled using the ornate Art Deco–style Pantages Theater, in Los Angeles, as inspiration.
The screening-room equipment could handle film, all formats of videotape, DVDs, and broadcast-television signals, projecting them onto a screen larger than many in the average suburban multiplex.
To watch videos and DVDs, Fric didn’t need the assistance of a projectionist. Sitting in the center seat in the center row, adjacent to the control console, he could run his own show.
Sometimes, when he knew that no cleaning had been scheduled in the theater, when he was certain that no one would come looking for him, he locked the door to ensure privacy, and he loaded the DVD player with one of his father’s movies.
Being seen watching a Ghost Dad movie was unthinkable.
Not that they sucked. Some of them sucked, of course, because no star rang the big bell every time. But some were all right. Some were cool. A few were even amazing.
If anyone were to see him watching his father’s movies under these circumstances, however, he would be the National Academy of Nerds’ choice for Greatest Nerd of the Decade. Maybe of the century. The Pathetic Losers Club would vote him a free lifetime membership.
Mr. Hachette, the psychopathic chef related to the Frankenstein family, would mock him with sneers and by drawing sly comparisons between Fric’s sticklike physique and his father’s maximum buffness.
Anyway, in the only occupied seat of sixty, with the ornate Art Deco ceiling soaring thirty-four feet overhead, Fric sometimes sat in the dark and ran Ghost Dad’s movies on the huge screen. Drenched in Dolby surround sound.
He watched certain films for the stories, though he’d seen them many times. He watched others for blow-out-the-walls special effects.
And always in his father’s performances, Fric looked for the qualities, the charms, the expressions, and the bits of business that made millions of people all over the world love Channing Manheim.
In the better films, such moments abounded. Even in the suckiest of the sucky, however, there were scenes in which you couldn’t help but like the guy, admire him, want so much to hang out with him.
When citing the brightest moments in his finest films, critics had said that Fric’s father was magical. “Magical” sounded stupid, like gooey girl gush, embarrassing, but it was the right word.
Sometimes you watched him on the big screen, and he seemed more colorful, more real than anyone you’d ever known. Or ever would know.
This super-real quality couldn’t be explained by the giant size of his projected image or by the visual genius of the cameraman. Nor by the brilliance of the director—most being no more brilliant than a boiled potato—nor by the layered details achieved through digital technology. Most actors, including stars, didn’t have the Manheim magic even when they worked with the best directors and technicians.
You watched him up there, and he seemed to have been everywhere, to have seen everything, to know all that could be known. He seemed to be wiser, more caring, funnier, and braver than anyone, anywhere, ever—as though he lived in six dimensions while everyone else had to live in only three.
Fric had studied certain scenes over and over again, scores of times, maybe a hundred times in some cases, until they seemed as real to him as any moments he had actually spent with his father.
Once in a while, when he went to bed drag-ass tired, but was able to settle only on the twilight edge of sleep, or when he woke incompletely in the middle of the night yet continued to skate upon the surface of a temporarily frozen dream, those special movie scenes with his father did seem real to Fric. They played in memory not as though he’d viewed them from a theater seat, but as though they were true-life experiences that he and his father had shared.
These dreamy spells of half-sleep were some of the happiest moments of Fric’s life.
Of cou
rse, if he ever told anyone that those were some of the happiest moments of his life, the Pathetic Losers Club would erect a thirty-foot statue of him, emphasizing his uncombable hair and his skinny neck, and they would spotlight it on the same hill that held the HOLLYWOOD sign.
So on this Monday evening, though Fric might have preferred to eat in the theater while watching his father beat the crap out of bad guys and save an entire orphanage full of waifs, he dined in the wine cellar because in the pre-Christmas bustle, little privacy could be found elsewhere in Palazzo Rospo.
Ms. Sanchez and Ms. Norbert, the maids who lived on the estate, had been away on an early Christmas leave for the past ten days. They would not return until Thursday morning, December 24.
Mrs. McBee and Mr. McBee would be gone Tuesday and Wednesday, to have an early Christmas with their son and his family in Santa Barbara. They, too, would return to Palazzo Rospo on December 24, to ensure that the biggest movie star in the world was met with the proper pomp when he arrived from Florida later that afternoon.
Consequently, here on Monday evening, the other four maids and the porters were working late, under the firm direction of the busy McBees, alongside a few outsourced services that included a six-man floor-cleaning crew specializing in the care of marble and limestone, an eight-person holiday-decorating team, and an emergency feng-shui facilitator who would make certain that various Christmas trees and other seasonal displays were arranged and festooned in such a way as not to interfere with the proper energy flow of the great house.
Madness.
Far from the hum of floor-polishing machines and the jolly laughter of the Christmas-besotted decorating team, Fric took refuge deep underground in the wine cellar. Within these brick walls, under this low, vaulted brick ceiling, the only sounds were those he made swallowing and the clink of his fork against his plate.
And then: Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Muffled but audible, the phone rang inside a keg.
Because the temperature in the tasting room was too high for wine storage, the barrels and bottles in this chamber, on the warmer side of the glass wall, were strictly decorative.