twisted by righteous anger. “Get out of here now, get out!”
As he headed toward the door, the detective said, “Don’t forget your apple juice. Got to build some strength for the trial.”
Junior discovered more tears than could have been found in ten thousand onions. His wife and his unborn baby. He had been willing to sacrifice his beloved Naomi, but maybe he would have found the cost too high if he had known that he was also sacrificing his first-conceived child. This was too much. He was bereft.
No more than a minute after Vanadium departed, a nurse arrived in a rush, no doubt sent by the hateful cop. Hard to tell, through all the tears, if she was a looker. A nice face, perhaps. But such a stick-thin body.
Concerned that Junior’s crying jag would trigger spasms of the abdominal muscles and ultimately another attack of hemorrhagic vomiting, the nurse had with her a tranquilizer. She wanted him to use the apple juice to wash down the pill.
Junior would rather have chugged a beaker of carbolic acid than touch the juice, because the lunch tray had been brought to him by Thomas Vanadium. The maniac cop, determined to get his man one way or another, was capable of resorting to poison if he felt that the usual instruments of the law were unequal to the task.
At Junior’s insistence, the nurse poured a glass of water from the bedside carafe. Vanadium had been nowhere near the carafe.
After a while, the tranquilizer and the relaxation techniques taught by Caesar Zedd restored Junior’s self-control.
The nurse stayed with him until his storm of tears had passed. Clearly, he wasn’t going to succumb to violent nervous emesis.
She promised to bring fresh apple juice after he complained that the serving before him had an odd taste.
Alone, calm again, Junior was able to apply what was arguably the central tenet of the philosophy of Zedd: Always look for the bright side.
Regardless of the severity of a setback, no matter how dreadful a blow you sustained, you could always discover a bright side if you searched hard enough. The key to happiness, success, and mental health was utterly to ignore the negative, deny its power over you, and find reason to celebrate every development in life, including the cruelest catastrophe, by discovering the bright side to even the darkest hour.
In this case, the bright side was blindingly bright. Having lost both a singularly beautiful wife and an unborn child, Junior would earn the sympathy—the pity, the love—of any jury in front of whom the state might hope to defend against a wrongful-death suit.
Earlier, he’d been surprised by the visit from Knacker, Hisscus, and Nork. He hadn’t thought he’d see their kind for days; and then he would have expected no more than a single attorney taking a low-key approach and making a modest proposal.
Now he understood why they had descended in strength, eager to discuss redress, requital, restitutional apology. The coroner had informed them, before the police, that Naomi had been pregnant, and they had recognized the state’s extreme vulnerability.
The nurse returned with fresh apple juice, chilled and sweet.
Junior sipped the beverage slowly. By the time he reached the bottom of the glass, he had come to the inescapable conclusion that Naomi had been hiding her pregnancy from him.
In the six weeks since conception, she must have missed at least one menstrual period. She hadn’t complained of morning sickness, but surely she’d experienced it. It was highly unlikely that she’d been unaware of her condition.
He had never expressed opposition to starting a family. She’d had no reason to fear telling him that she was carrying their child.
Regrettably, he had no choice but to conclude that she hadn’t made up her mind whether to keep the baby or to seek out an illegal abortion without Junior’s approval. She had been thinking about scraping his child out of her womb without even telling him.
This insult, this outrage, this treachery stunned Junior.
Inevitably, he had to wonder if Naomi had kept her pregnancy secret because, indeed, she suspected that the child wasn’t her husband’s.
If blood tests revealed that Junior wasn’t the father, Vanadium would have a motive. It wouldn’t be the right motive, because Junior truly hadn’t known either that his wife was pregnant or that she was possibly screwing around with another man. But the detective would be able to sell it to a prosecutor, and the prosecutor would convince at least a few jurors.
Naomi, you dumb, unfaithful bitch.
He ardently wished that he hadn’t killed her with such merciful swiftness. If he’d tortured her first, he would now have the memory of her suffering from which to take consolation.
For a while he looked for the bright side. It eluded him.
He ate the lime Jell-O. The soda crackers.
Eventually, Junior remembered the quarter. He reached into the right pocket of the thin cotton bathrobe, but the coin wasn’t there, as it should have been. The left pocket also was empty.
Chapter 27
WALTER PANGLO, the only mortician in Bright Beach, was a sweet-tempered wisp of a man who enjoyed puttering in his garden when he wasn’t planting dead people. He grew prize roses and gave them away in great bouquets to the sick, to young people in love, to the school librarian on her birthday, to clerks who had been polite to him.
His wife, Dorothea, adored him, not least of all because he had taken in her eighty-year-old mother and treated that elderly lady as though she were both a duchess and a saint. He was equally generous to the poor, burying their dead at cost but with utmost dignity.
Jacob Isaacson—twin brother of Edom—knew nothing negative about Panglo, but he didn’t trust him. If the mortician had been caught prying gold teeth from the dead and carving satanic symbols in their buttocks, Jacob would have said, “It figures.” If Panglo had saved bottles of infected blood from diseased cadavers, and if one day he ran through town, splashing it in the faces of unsuspecting citizens, Jacob would not have raised one eyebrow in surprise.
Jacob trusted no one but Agnes and Edom. He’d trusted Joey Lampion, too, after years of wary observance. Now Joey was dead, and his corpse was in the embalming chamber of the Panglo Funeral Home.
Currently, Jacob was far removed from the embalming chamber and intended never to set foot there, alive. With Walter Panglo as his guide, he toured the casket selection in the funeral-planning room.
He wanted the most expensive box for Joey; but Joey, a modest and prudent man, would have disapproved. Instead, he selected a handsome but not ornate casket just above the median price.
Deeply distressed that he was planning the funeral of a man as young as Joe Lampion, whom he had liked and admired, Panglo paused to express his disbelief and to murmur comforting words, more to himself than to Jacob, as each decision was made. With one hand on the chosen casket, he said, “Unbelievable, a traffic accident, and on the very day his son is born. So sad. So terribly sad.”
“Not so unbelievable,” said Jacob. “Forty-five thousand people every year die in automobiles. Cars aren’t transportation. They’re death machines. Tens of thousands are disfigured, maimed for life.”
Whereas Edom feared the wrath of nature, Jacob knew that the true hand of doom was the hand of humankind.
“Not that trains are any better. Look at the Bakersfield crash back in ’60. Santa Fe Chief, out of San Francisco, smashed into an oil-tank truck. Seventeen people crushed, burned in a river of fire.”
Jacob feared what men could do with clubs, knives, guns, bombs, with their bare hands, but he was most preoccupied by the unintended death that humanity brought upon itself with its devices, machines, and structures meant to improve the quality of life.
“Fifty died in London, in ’57, when two trains crashed. And a hundred twelve were crushed, torn, mangled, in ’52, also England.”
Frowning, Panglo said, “Terrible, you’re right, so many terrible things happen, but I don’t see why trains—”
“It’s all the same. Cars, trains, ships, all the same,” Jacob in
sisted. “You remember the Toya Maru? Japanese ferry capsized back in September ’54. Eleven hundred sixty-eight people dead. Or worse, in ’48, off Manchuria, God almighty, the boiler exploded on a Chinese merchant ship, six thousand died. Six thousand on a single ship!”
Over the following hour, as Walter Panglo guided Jacob through the planning of the funeral, Jacob recounted the gruesome details of numerous airliner crashes, shipwrecks, train collisions, coal-mine disasters, dam collapses, hotel fires, nightclub fires, pipeline and oil-well explosions, munitions-plant explosions….
By the time all the details of mortuary and cemetery services were settled, Walter Panglo had a nervous tic in his left cheek. His eyes were open wide, as if he’d been so startled that his lids froze in a position of ascension, locked by a spasm of surprise. His hands must have grown clammy; he blotted them repeatedly on his suit.
Aware of the mortician’s new edginess, Jacob was convinced that his initial distrust of Panglo was justified. This twitchy little guy seemed to have something to hide. Jacob didn’t have to be a cop to recognize nervousness born of guilt.
At the front door of the funeral home, as Panglo was showing him out, Jacob leaned close. “Joe Lampion didn’t have any gold teeth.”
Panglo seemed baffled. He was probably faking it.
The diminutive mortician spoke a few comforting words instead of commenting on the dental history of the deceased, and when he put a consoling hand on Jacob’s shoulder, Jacob cringed from his touch.
Confused, Panglo held out his right hand, but Jacob said, “Sorry, no offense, but I don’t shake with anyone.”
“Well, certainly, I understand,” said Panglo, slowly lowering the offered hand, although he clearly didn’t understand at all.
“It’s just that you never know what anyone’s hand has been up to recently,” Jacob explained. “That respectable banker down the street might have thirty dismembered women buried in his backyard. The nice church-going lady next door might be sleeping in the same bed with the rotting corpse of a lover who tried to jilt her, and for a hobby she makes jewelry from the finger bones of preschool children she’s tortured and murdered.”
Panglo safely tucked both hands in his pants pockets.
“I’ve got hundreds of files on cases like that,” said Jacob, “and much worse. If you’re interested, I’ll get you copies of some.”
“That’s kind of you,” Panglo stammered, “but I have little time for reading, very little time.”
Reluctant to leave Joey’s body with the oddly jumpy mortician, Jacob nevertheless crossed the porch of the Victorian-style funeral home and left without glancing back. He walked one mile home, alert to passing traffic, especially cautious at intersections.
His apartment, over the large garage, was reached by a set of exterior stairs. The space was divided into two rooms. The first was a combination living room and kitchenette, with a corner dining table seating two. Beyond was a small bedroom with adjoining bath.
More walls than not, in both rooms, were lined with bookshelves and file cabinets. Here he kept numerous case studies of accidents, man-made disasters, serial killers, spree killers: proof undeniable that humanity was a fallen species engaged in both the unintentional and calculated destruction of itself.
In the neatly ordered bedroom, he removed his shoes. Stretching out on the bed, he stared at the ceiling, feeling useless.
Agnes widowed. Bartholomew born fatherless.
Too much, too much.
Jacob didn’t know how he could ever bear to look at Agnes when she came home from the hospital. The sorrow in her eyes would kill him as surely as a knife to the heart.
Her lifelong optimism, her buoyancy, which she had miraculously sustained through so many difficult years, would never survive this. She would no longer be a rock of hope for him and Edom. Their future was despair, undiluted and unrelenting.
Maybe he would get lucky, and an airliner would fall out of the sky right now, right here, obliterating him in an instant.
They lived too far from the nearest railroad tracks. He could not rationally expect a derailed train to crash through the garage.
On a positive note, the apartment was heated by a gas furnace. A leak, a spark, an explosion, and he would never have to see poor Agnes in her misery.
After a while, when no plane crashed on top of him, Jacob got up, went into the kitchen, and mixed a batch of dough for Agnes’s favorite treats. Chocolate-chip cookies with coconut and pecans.
He considered himself to be a thoroughly useless man, taking up space in a world to which he contributed nothing, but he did have a talent for baking. He could take any recipe, even one from a world-class pastry chef, and improve upon it.
When he was baking, the world seemed to be a less dangerous place. Sometimes, making a cake, he forgot to be afraid.
The gas oven might blow up in his face, at last bringing him peace, but if it didn’t, he would at least have cookies for Agnes.
Chapter 28
SHORTLY BEFORE one o’clock, the Hackachaks descended in a fury, eyes full of bloody intent, teeth bared, voices shrill.
Junior had expected these singular creatures, and he needed them to be as monstrous as they had always been in the past. Nonetheless, he shrank back against his pillows in dismay when they exploded into the hospital room. Their faces were as fierce as those of painted cannibals coming off a fast. They gestured emphatically, spitting expletives along with tiny bits of lunch dislodged from their teeth by the force of their condemnations.
Rudy Hackachak—Big Rude to his friends—was six feet four, as rough-hewn as a log sculpture carved with a woodsman’s ax. In a green polyester suit with sleeves an inch too short, an unfortunate urine-yellow shirt, and a tie that might have been the national flag of a third-world country famous for nothing but a lack of design sense, he looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s beast gussied up for an evening of barhopping in Transylvania.
“You better wise up, you tree-humping nitwit,” Rudy advised Junior, grabbing the bed railing as if he might tear it off and use it to club his son-in-law senseless.
If Big Rude was Naomi’s father, he must not have contributed a single gene to her, must have somehow shock-fertilized his wife’s egg with just his booming voice, with an orgasmic bellow, because nothing about Naomi—neither in appearance nor personality—had resembled him in the least.
Sheena Hackachak, at forty-four, was more beautiful than any current movie star. She looked twenty years younger than her true age, and she so resembled her late daughter that Junior felt a rush of erotic nostalgia at the sight of her.
Similarities between Naomi and her mom ended with appearances. Sheena was loud, crass, self-absorbed, and had the vocabulary of a brothel owner specializing in service to sailors with Tourette’s syndrome.
She stepped to the bed, bracketing Junior between her and Big Rude. The stream of obscene invective issuing from Sheena made Junior feel as if he had gotten in the way of a septic-tank cleanout hose.
To the foot of the bed slouched the third and final Hackachak: twenty-four-year-old Kaitlin, Naomi’s big sister. Kaitlin was the unfortunate sister, having inherited her looks from her father and her personality equally from both parents. A peculiar coppery cast enlivened her brown eyes, and in a certain slant of light, her angry glare could flash as red as blood.
Kaitlin had the piercing voice and talent for vituperation that marked her as a member of the Hackachak tribe, but for now she was content to leave the vocal assault to her parents. The stare with which she drilled Junior, however, if brought to bear on a promising geological formation, would core the earth and strike oil in minutes.
They had not come to Junior yesterday in their grief, if in fact they had thought to grieve.
They hadn’t been close to Naomi, who’d once said she felt like Romulus and Remus, raised by wolves, or like Tarzan if he’d fallen into the hands of nasty gorillas. To Junior, Naomi was Cinderella, sweet and good, and he was the love-struck princ
e who rescued her.
The Hackachaks had arrived post-grief, brought to the hospital by the news that Junior had expressed distaste at the prospect of profiting from his wife’s tragic fall. They knew he had turned away Knacker, Hisscus, and Nork.
His in-laws’ chances of receiving compensation for their pain and suffering over Naomi’s death were seriously compromised if her husband did not hold the state or county responsible. In this, as in nothing previously, they felt the need to stand united as a family.
In the instant that Junior had shoved Naomi into the rotted railing, he had foreseen this visit from Rudy, Sheena, and Kaitlin. He’d known he could pretend to be offended at the state’s offer to put a price on his loss, could feign revulsion, could resist convincingly—until gradually, after grueling days or weeks, he reluctantly allowed the indefatigable Hackachaks to browbeat him into a despairing, exhausted, disgusted compliance with their greed.
By the time his ferocious in-laws had finished with him, Junior would have won the sympathy of Knacker, Hisscus, Nork, and everyone else who might have harbored doubts about his role in Naomi’s demise. Perhaps even Thomas Vanadium would find his suspicion worn away.
Shrieking like carrion-eating birds waiting for their wounded dinner to die, the Hackachaks twice drew stern warnings from nurses. They were told to quiet down and respect the patients in neighboring rooms.
More than twice, worried nurses—and even a resident internist—braved the tumult to check on Junior’s condition. They asked if he really felt up to entertaining visitors, these visitors.
“They’re all the family I have,” Junior said with what he hoped sounded like sorrow and long-suffering love.
This claim wasn’t true. His father, an unsuccessful artist and highly successful alcoholic, lived in Santa Monica, California. His mother, divorced when Junior was four, had been committed to an insane asylum twelve years ago. He rarely saw them. He hadn’t told Naomi about them. Neither of his parents was a résumé enhancer.
After the latest concerned nurse departed, Sheena leaned close. She cruelly pinched Junior’s cheek between thumb and forefinger, as if she might tear off a gobbet of flesh and pop it into her mouth.
“Get this through your head, you shit-for-brains. I lost a daughter, a precious daughter, my Naomi, the light of my life.”
Kaitlin glared at her mother as though betrayed.
“Naomi—she popped out of my oven twenty years ago, not out of yours,” Sheena continued in a fierce whisper. “If anyone’s suffering here, it’s me, not you. Who’re you, anyway? Some guy who’s been boinking her for a couple years, that’s all you are. I’m her mother. You can never know my pain. And if you don’t stand with this family to make these wankers pay up big-time, I’ll personally cut your balls off while you’re sleeping and feed them to my cat.”
“You don’t have a cat.”
“I’ll buy one,” Sheena promised.
Junior knew she’d fulfill her threat. Even if he hadn’t wanted money himself—and he wanted it—he would never dare thwart Sheena.
Even Rudy, as huge as Big Foot and as amoral as a skink, was afraid of this woman.
All three of these sorry excuses for human beings were money mad. Rudy owned six successful used-car dealerships and—his pride—a Ford franchise selling new and used vehicles, in five Oregon communities, but he liked to live large; he also visited Vegas four times a year, pouring money away as casually as he might empty his bladder. Sheena enjoyed Vegas, too, and was a fiend for shopping. Kaitlin liked men, pretty ones, but since she might be mistaken for her father in a dimly lighted room, her hunks came at a price.
At one point late in the afternoon, as all three Hackachaks were hurling scorn and invective at Junior, he noticed Vanadium standing in the doorway, observing. Perfect. He pretended not to see the cop, and when next he sneaked a look, he discovered that Vanadium had vanished like a wraith. A thick slab of a wraith.
During the day and then following a dinner break, the Hackachaks persisted. The hospital had never witnessed such a spectacle. Shifts changed, and new nurses came to attend to Junior in greater numbers than necessary, using any excuse to get a glimpse of the freak show.
By the time the family was ushered out, protesting, at the end of evening visiting hours, Junior hadn’t succumbed to their pressure. If his conversion was to appear convincingly reluctant, he would have to resist them for at least another few days.
Alone at last, he was exhausted. Physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
Murder itself was easy, but the aftermath was more draining than he had anticipated. Although the ultimate liability settlement with the state was certain to leave him financially secure for life, the stress was so great that he wondered, in his darker moments, if the reward would prove to be worth the risk.
He decided that he must never again kill so impetuously. Never. In fact, he vowed never again to kill at all, except in self-defense. Soon he would be rich—with much to lose if he was caught. Homicide was a marvelous adventure; sadly, however, it was an entertainment that he could no longer afford.
If he had known that he would break his solemn vow twice before the month was ended—and that neither victim, unfortunately, would be a Hackachak—he might not have fallen asleep so easily. And he might not have dreamed of cleverly stealing hundreds of quarters out of Thomas Vanadium’s pockets while the baffled detective searched for them in vain.
Chapter 29