Going to and from the BMW to secure a replacement suppressor seemed like an unnecessary complication. Instead, he crouched beside his riddled lover and felt her throat, trying to detect a pulse in her carotid artery.
She was as dead as disco.
In the bathroom, Corky washed his genitals, hands, and face. To be in love with chaos, one did not have to be scornful of good personal hygiene.
From the medicine cabinet, he withdrew a large bottle of Scope mouthwash. With Brittina dead and quite incapable of being offended, Corky took a swig directly from the container, and gargled.
Her kisses left him with a bad taste.
As a result of Brittina’s habit of fasting more than not, she had frequently been in a state of ketosis, during which her body was forced to burn what meager stores of fat it might have been jealously guarding. Among the symptoms of ketosis are nausea and vomiting, but a more pleasant symptom is sweet, fruity-smelling breath.
Corky enjoyed the fragrance of her breath, but after swapping a lot of spit, tongue to tongue, he was sometimes left with a sour aftertaste. Like all things in an imperfect world, lovemaking always comes with a price.
In this case, of course, the price had been greater for Brittina than for him.
He dressed quickly. In his stocking feet, he descended the narrow stairs to the cramped kitchen at the back of the house.
His yellow slicker and rain hat hung on a wall peg in the small screened porch off the kitchen. His black boots stood to one side of the slicker.
Rain crashed in such heavy cascades upon the porch roof that it sounded like a downpour in the jungled tropics. He half expected to see grinning crocodiles in the backyard and pythons slithering in the trees.
He slipped the pistol into one of the capacious pockets of the slicker. From another pocket he withdrew a length of flexible rubber tubing and an object that resembled a snack-size container of yogurt, though it was black with a red lid and featured no illustrations of luscious fruit.
With no reason remaining to be respectful of Brittina’s clean floors, he pulled on his boots and returned to the house. The deep wet tread of his rubber soles squeaked on the vinyl tile in the kitchen.
His work was not yet completed. He had left behind evidence that would convict him of murder. Semen, hair, fingerprints—all must be eliminated.
From the day that he’d begun visiting this pinched place, months previously, he had gone without the latex gloves that he customarily wore at the scenes of capital crimes. Even though Brittina Dowd was nothing if not an eccentric, she would surely have grown suspicious of a lover who at all times wore surgical gloves.
Steeper and narrower stairs than any others in the house led down from the kitchen to a garage in which three of the four walls were underground. Gloom gathered here as luxuriously as ever it had coiled in any catacomb or dungeon.
Corky could almost hear a multitude of spiders plucking their silken harp strings.
Four small windows in the garage door would have admitted some sun on a classic California day. Now the gray storm gloom could not penetrate the dusty glass.
He switched on a bare bulb overhead, providing hardly enough light by which to drain the god of Zoroastrianism.
The god of Zoroastrianism is Ahura Mazda. Brittina’s car was a Mazda, without the Ahura, but Corky enjoyed his little joke anyway.
From the trunk, he removed four hairspray-size aerosol cans with any one of which a stranded motorist could inflate a flat tire and at the same time seal the puncture in it. He set these aside and then took from the trunk a pair of empty two-gallon gasoline cans.
He had purchased these items for Brittina, in addition to road flares and a yellow pennant emblazoned with EMERGENCY in bold black letters, and had insisted that she keep them in the trunk of her Zoroastrian god at all times.
She had been touched by his concern and had said that diamonds would not have proved his love as surely as did these humble gifts. They were, in fact, part of his preparations to dispose of her body when the day arrived to kill her.
Corky would never deny that he could be brilliantly romantic when required, but greater than his flair for romance was his talent for meticulous preparation. Whether he was roasting a Thanksgiving turkey or murdering an inconvenient lover, or scheming to kidnap the son of the biggest movie star in the world, he approached the task with considerable thought and patience, taking all the time necessary to develop a flawless strategy as well as tactics certain to ensure success.
She had never asked why two fuel cans, when one would have been all that she could easily carry. He had known that she would not ask or even wonder, for she had been a woman of images and memes and utopian dreams, not one with an interest in math or logic.
He set the empty two-gallon cans on the floor. He fed a shorter end of rubber tubing into the fuel port of the car. A suck on the longer end was required to prime the siphon.
Much practice at this sort of thing ensured that Corky drew as little fumes into his lungs as possible and that none of Shell Oil’s finest got in his mouth. The flow came quickly as he tucked the longer end into the first can.
When four gallons had been drawn and both cans filled, Corky carried the containers up to the ground floor. He left the trailing end of the siphon to spill a stream of gasoline on the garage floor.
He returned for the four aerosol cans. In the kitchen, he placed two of these on the lowest rack of the bottom oven. He left the other two on the lowest rack of the top oven.
On his way upstairs with one of the two-gallon cans, he switched off the thermostat on the main floor, and then the thermostat on the upper floor. This would prevent the electric starter from striking a spark in the natural-gas furnace and possibly triggering an explosion of accumulated gasoline fumes before Corky had left the house.
Leaving the cap on the can, pouring from the spout, he liberally splashed the pale naked body of Brittina Dowd. Her long hair offered tinder, but she didn’t have much fat to feed the fire.
After pouring no more than a quart of fuel in the bathroom, he distributed perhaps half a gallon over the rumpled bedclothes. He didn’t prime the two other small upstairs rooms because he’d never been in them and because he didn’t need to saturate every corner to achieve the effect he wanted.
From the bedroom he drizzled an uninterrupted gasoline trail into the narrow upstairs hallway and down the stairs to the ground floor. At the bottom of the steps, he cast aside the empty can and picked up the full one.
He continued in a looping fashion through the living room and the dining room, to the kitchen doorway. There he set the can on the threshold. He unscrewed the cap and tossed it aside.
From a jacket pocket, he retrieved the black-and-red object that was about the size of a single-serving yogurt container: a chemical-action detonator.
The casing of the detonator was somewhat pliable. He shaped it into the hole that had been covered by the screw-on cap, plugging the two-gallon can in which approximately half a gallon of gasoline remained.
He popped a ring tab off the red cap. This initiated a chemical process that would rapidly generate heat and, in four minutes, an explosion fiery enough to ignite the remaining contents of the two-gallon can and the trail of fuel leading away from it to the bedroom on the second floor, to the corpse.
This would be a bad time for the doorbell to ring.
No chimes sounded, of course, because in addition to his fine strategy, solid tactics, and meticulous preparation, he could count on Laputa luck. His guardian angel was chaos, and he was always at the safe calm eye of its world-destroying force.
He returned to the ovens and latched both doors as required to initiate the self-cleaning cycle. On each he pressed a button marked CLEAN.
Heat would rapidly expand the pressurized contents of the cans, which would explode. Because the doors were latched, the power of the explosions couldn’t easily be vented. The resultant damage to the ovens might be severe enough to cause a natural-gas leak a
nd a larger blast.
The utter destruction of the house didn’t require the oven trick to work. The four gallons of high-grade accelerant that he had poured throughout the small structure and the additional gallons pooling on the garage floor would feed the flames and obliterate every source of his DNA, from semen to hairs, and every fingerprint that he’d left behind. Nonetheless, he believed in redundancy whenever possible.
On the back porch, Corky shrugged into his voluminous yellow slicker. He jammed the droopy rain hat on his head.
He pushed through the screen door and went down the steps. At the end of the backyard, he passed through a gate into an alleyway and never glanced again at the narrow house.
He thrived in the rain.
Cataracts gushed from the sky. The racing torrents in the gutters overflowed the curbs.
This downpour would not quench the fire that he had engineered. The gasoline-fed flames would thoroughly gut the wooden structure before the walls collapsed and offered admission to the rain.
Indeed, the storm was his ally. Badly flooded intersections and snarled traffic would delay the fire engines.
He had just turned a corner and come within sight of his BMW when he heard the first explosion in the distance. The sound was low, flat, muffled, but ugly.
Soon he would have erased everyone and every clue that might have led the police to him after the assault on Palazzo Rospo.
CHAPTER 59
FROM THE MORE REMOTE ROOMS IN PALAZZO Rospo, Fric gathered earthquake lights in a picnic hamper.
The mansion and the outlying buildings had been reengineered for seismic security and retrofitted with structural reinforcements that were supposed to ensure little or no damage even from a two-minute shaker peaking at 8.0 on the Richter scale.
Generally, 8.0 was considered to be the kiss-your-ass-good-bye number. Earthquakes that big struck only in movies.
If a humongous killer quake knocked out the city’s power supply, Palazzo Rospo would be able to rely on gasoline-fueled generators in a subterranean vault that had two-foot-thick, poured-in-place, steel-reinforced walls and ceiling. Following a regional catastrophe, the mansion should remain fully lighted, the computers should continue to run, the elevators should still be operating, the refrigerators should remain cold.
In the rose garden, the carved-granite fountain of urinating cherubs should continue to sprinkle eternally.
This backup would be less useful if heretofore unknown volcanoes erupted under Los Angeles and disgorged rivers of molten lava that turned hundreds of square miles into a smoldering wasteland or if an asteroid smashed into Bel Air. But even a star as famous and rich as Ghost Dad could not protect himself from cataclysm on a planetary scale.
If the Swiss-made generators in the bunker were disabled, then Frankenstein-castle banks of twenty-year batteries, each as big as a casket standing on end, instantly came into service. These supported limited emergency lighting, all computers, the security system, and other essential equipment for as long as ninety-six hours.
Should the city’s electric power fail, should the generators be wrecked, should the giant twenty-year batteries prove useless, there were many earthquake lights distributed throughout the house. Personally, Fric figured such a series of failures was likely only in the event of an invasion of extraterrestrials with magnetic-pulse weapons.
Anyway, according to Mrs. McBee, there were 214 quake lights, which meant you could safely bet your life that there were not 213 or 215.
These small but potentially bright, battery-powered flashlights were at all times plugged into electrical outlets in the baseboard, continuously charging. If the power failed, the quake lights at once switched on, providing enough pathway illumination to allow everyone to exit safely from the mansion in the darkest hours of the deepest night. Furthermore, they could be unplugged and carried as though they were ordinary flashlights.
Like the cover plate on the electrical outlet in which it was seated, the plastic casing of each flashlight matched the color of the baseboard on which it rested: beige against limestone baseboard, dark brown against mahogany, black against black marble…. During ordinary times, they were meant to be inconspicuous. When you lived with them day after day, you soon ceased to notice them.
No one but Mrs. McBee would be likely to realize that a dozen of those 214 were missing. Mrs. McBee wouldn’t return from Santa Barbara until Thursday morning.
Nevertheless, Fric filched quake lights only from remote and little-used rooms where their disappearance was less likely to cause inquiry. He needed them for his deep and special secret hiding place.
He stowed the lights in the picnic hamper because it had a hinged lid. As long as he kept the lid closed, the contents could not be seen if he unexpectedly encountered a member of the staff.
If anyone asked what was in the hamper, he would lie and say “Sandwiches.” He would tell them that he was going to camp out under a blanket tent in the billiards room, where he would pretend that he was a Blackfoot Indian living back in maybe 1880.
The whole concept of playing Blackfoot in the billiards room was monumentally stupid, of course. But most grownups believed that geeky ten-year-old boys did stupid, geeky things like that, so he would be believed, and probably pitied.
Having people pity you was better than having them think that you were as crazy as Barbra Streisand’s two-headed cat.
That was one of Ghost Dad’s expressions. When he thought someone didn’t have both oars in the water, he said, “The guy’s as crazy as Barbra Streisand’s two-headed cat.”
Years ago, Ghost Dad had signed a deal to make a movie directed by Barbra Streisand. Something had gone terribly wrong. Eventually, he backed out of the project.
He had never said a negative word about Ms. Streisand. But that didn’t mean they were as friendly and as eager for mutual adventures as all the little animals in The Wind in the Willows.
In the entertainment business, everyone pretended to be friends even if maybe they hated each other’s guts. They were kissy-faced, gushy-lovey, always hugging and backslapping, praising one another so convincingly that Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have figured out which of them really wanted to kill which others.
According to Ghost Dad, no one in the business dared tell the truth about anyone else in the business because each of them knew that any of the others was capable of conducting a bloody vendetta of such viciousness that it would have scared the shit out of the meanest Mafioso.
Barbra Streisand didn’t actually have a two-headed cat. This was just a “metaphor,” as Fric’s father called it, for some story element or character that she had wanted to add to her movie after Ghost Dad signed up based on a script without the two-headed cat.
He thought the two-headed cat was a totally crazy idea, and Ms. Streisand thought that it would win the picture a shitload of Oscars. So they agreed to disagree, kissed, hugged, swapped praise, and backed away from each other unbloodied.
This morning, in the hallway outside the kitchen, when Fric had almost told Mr. Truman about the mirror man and Moloch and all of it, he had come perilously close to being considered as crazy as Barbra Streisand’s two-headed cat. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
His mother had once been committed to a booby hatch.
They would think, Like mother, like son.
His mother had been released after ten days.
If Fric started talking about mirror men, they would never let him out. Not in ten days, not in ten years.
Worse, if he were in the booby hatch, Moloch would know exactly where to find him. There was no place to hide in a padded cell.
Carrying the picnic hamper as if he were on an Easter-egg hunt, stealthily collecting quake lights in a back staircase, in a back hall, in the tea room, in the meditation room, Fric kept reminding himself, “Sandwiches, sandwiches,” because he worried that when he finally encountered a maid or porter, he would become tongue-tied and forget what lie he had meant to tell.
By nature, he was not a good liar. In a time and place where you needed to lie merely to pass for normal, in a place and time when he needed to lie to survive, being a lousy liar could get him killed.
“Sandwiches, sandwiches.”
He was a moronically bad liar.
And he was alone. Even with some kind of half-assed guardian angel, he was really alone.
Every time he passed a window, he was reminded also that the stormy day was melting away rapidly and that Moloch would most likely come in the night.
Short for his age, thin for his age, a bad liar, alone, tick-tick-tick: He had nothing going for him.
“Pandwiches,” he muttered to himself. “Just some jellybutter-and-seanut pandwiches.”
He was doomed.
CHAPTER 60
QUEEN PALMS, KING PALMS, ROYAL PALMS, phoenix palms shook their feathery fronds like the storm-tossed trees in Key Largo. Buses and cars and trucks and SUVs clogged the streets, their wipers not quite as persistent as the beating rain, side windows half fogged, horns bleating, brakes barking, jockeying for position, idling and spurting forward and idling again, the drivers exuding a palpable frustration reminiscent of the opening scene of Falling Down, minus the summer heat of that movie, minus Michael Douglas, although Ethan supposed that Michael Douglas might be in this mess, too, quietly going as mad as had his character. In front of a bookstore, under an awning, stood a group of spike-haired, eyebrow-pierced, nose-pierced, tongue-pierced, painted punk rockers or just plain punks, dressed in black, one of them wearing a bowler hat, which made him think of the droogs in A Clockwork Orange. And here came a group of teenage schoolgirls, all beautiful, enjoying their seasonal freedom, walking without umbrellas, their hair plastered to their heads, all laughing, each of them playing the part of a fey party girl, all trying to be Holly Golightly in a remake of Breakfast at Tiffany’s shot this time three thousand miles from the original location, this time on the nation’s wild coast. The storm gloom transformed midday to dusk, as if some director were shooting day-for-night. The shop lights, the neon, the cold-cathode tubes, the bright festoons of colorful and vaguely Asian lanterns that decorated streets in a politically correct nonreligious holiday spirit, the headlights and taillights—all rippled and flared off the storefront windows, off the walls of the glass buildings that rose in lunatic defiance of the earthquakes to come, across the wet pavement, sparkled like sequins in scintillant quicksilver plumes of vehicle exhaust, reminding Ethan of atmospheric shots in Blade Runner.