In the living room, he removed a decorative pillow from the sofa. He carried it into the foyer.
I told the police about your disgusting little come-on with the ice spoon.
He assumed that she hadn’t phoned the police to make a formal report. No need to go out of her way to slander Junior when Thomas Vanadium had been prowling the hospital at all hours of the day and night, ready to lend an ear to any falsehood about him, as long as it made him appear to be a sleazeball and a wife killer.
More likely than not, Victoria spoke directly to the maniac detective. Even if she reported her sordid fabrications to another officer, it would have gotten back to Vanadium, and the cop would have sought her out at once to hear her filth firsthand, whereupon she would have enhanced her story until it sounded as though Junior had grabbed her knockers and had tried to shove his tongue down her throat.
Now, if Victoria reported to Vanadium that Junior had shown up at her door with a red rose and a bottle of Merlot and with romance on his mind, the demented detective would be on his ass again for sure. Vanadium might think that the nurse had misinterpreted the business with the ice spoon, but the intent in this instance would be unmistakable, and the crusading cop—the holy fool—would never give up.
Victoria moaned but did not stir.
Nurses were supposed to be angels of mercy. She had shown him no mercy. And she was certainly no angel.
Kneeling at her side, Junior placed the decorative pillow over her lovely face and pressed down firmly while Frank Sinatra finished “Hello, Young Lovers,” and sang perhaps half of “All or Nothing at All.” Victoria never regained consciousness, never had a chance to struggle.
After checking her carotid artery and detecting no pulse, Junior returned to the sofa in the living room. He fluffed the little pillow and left it precisely as he had found it.
He felt no urge whatsoever to puke.
Yet he didn’t fault himself for a lack of sensitivity. He’d met this woman only once before. He wasn’t emotionally invested in her as he had been in sweet Naomi.
He wasn’t wholly without feeling, of course. A poignant current of sadness eddied in his heart, a sadness at the thought of the love and the happiness that he and the nurse might have known together. But it was her choice, after all, to play the tease and to deal with him so cruelly.
When Junior tried to lift Victoria, her voluptuousness lost its appeal. As dead weight, she was heavier than he expected.
In the kitchen, he sat her in a chair and let her slump forward over the breakfast table. With her arms folded, with her head on her arms and turned to one side, she appeared to be resting.
Heart racing, but reminding himself that strength and wisdom arose from a calm mind, Junior stood in the center of the small kitchen, slowly turning to study every angle of the room.
With the dead woman’s guest on the way, minutes were precious. Attention to detail was essential, however, regardless of how much time was required to properly stage the little tableau that might disguise murder as a domestic accident.
Unfortunately, Caesar Zedd had not written a self-help book on how to commit homicide and escape the consequences thereof, and as before, Junior was entirely on his own.
With haste and an economy of movement, he set to work.
First he tore two paper towels from a wall-mounted dispenser and held one in each hand, as makeshift gloves. He was determined to leave no fingerprints.
Dinner was cooking in the upper of the two ovens. He switched on the bottom oven, setting it at warm, and dropped open the door.
In the dining room, he picked up the two dinner plates from the place settings. He returned with them to the kitchen and put them in the lower oven, as though Victoria were using it as a plate warmer.
He left the oven door open.
In the refrigerator, he found a stick of butter in a container with a clear plastic lid. He took the container to the cutting board beside the sink, to the left of the cooktop, and opened it.
A knife already lay on the counter nearby. He used it to slice four pats of butter, yellow and creamy, each half an inch thick, off the end of the stick.
Leaving three of the pats in the container, he carefully placed the fourth on the vinyl-tile floor.
The paper towels were spotted with butter. He crumpled them and threw them in the trash.
He intended to mash the sole of Victoria’s right shoe in the pat of butter and leave a long smear on the floor, as though she slipped on it and fell toward the ovens.
Finally, holding her head in both hands, he would have to smash her brow with considerable force into the corner of the open oven door, being careful to place the point of impact precisely where the bottle had struck her.
He supposed that the Scientific Investigation Division of the Oregon State Police might find at least one reason to be suspicious of the tragic scenario that he was creating. He didn’t know much about the technology that police might employ at a crime scene, and he knew even less about forensic pathology. He was just doing the best job he could.
The Spruce Hills Police Department was far too small to have a full-blown Scientific Investigation Division. And if the tableau presented to them appeared convincing enough, they might accept the death as a freak accident and never turn to the state police for technical assistance.
If the state police did get involved, and even if they found evidence that the accident was staged, they would most likely point the finger of blame at the man for whom Victoria had been preparing dinner.
Nothing remained to be done but to press her shoe in the butter and hammer her head into the corner of the oven door.
He was about to lift the body out of the chair when he heard the car in the driveway. He might not have caught the sound of the engine so distinctly and so early if the stereo had not been in the process of changing albums.
No time now to arrange the corpse for viewing.
One crisis after another. This new life as a man of action was not dull.
In adversity lies great opportunity, as Caesar Zedd teaches, and always, of course, there is a bright side even when you aren’t able immediately to see it.
Junior hurried out of the kitchen and along the hallway to the front door. He ran silently, landing on his toes like a dancer. His natural athletic grace was one of the things that drew so many women to him.
Sad symbols of a romance not meant to be, the red rose and the bottle of wine lay on the floor of the foyer. With the corpse gone, no signs of violence remained.
As Sinatra began to sing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Junior stepped around the bloom and the Merlot. He cautiously peeled back two inches of the curtain at one of the sidelights.
A sedan had come to a stop in the graveled driveway, over to the right of the house, almost out of view. As Junior watched, the headlights were doused. The engine shut off. The driver’s door opened. A man got out of the car, a shadowy figure in the fearsome yellow moonlight. The dinner guest.
Chapter 35
IMPLODE. To burst inward under pressure. Like the hull of a submarine at too great a depth.
Junior had learned implode from a self-help book about how to improve your vocabulary and be well-spoken. At the time, he had thought that this word—among others in the lists he memorized—was one he would never use. Now it was the perfect description of how he felt: as if he were going to implode.
The dinner guest leaned back into the car, as though to retrieve something. Perhaps he, too, had been considerate enough to bring a small gift for his hostess.
When Victoria failed to answer the door, this man would not simply go away. He had been invited. He was expected. Lights were on in the house. The lack of a response to his knock would be taken as a sign that something was amiss.
Junior was at critical depth. The psychological pressure was at least five thousand pounds per square inch and growing by the second. Implosion imminent.
If he was left standing on the porch, the visitor would circle
the house, peering in windows where the drapes were not drawn, trying the doors in hope of finding one unlocked. Fearful that Victoria was sick or injured, that perhaps she had slipped on a pat of butter and cracked her head against the corner of an open oven door, he might try to force his way inside, break a window. Certainly he would go to the neighbors to call the police.
Six thousand pounds per square inch. Eight. Ten.
Junior sprinted into the dining room and snatched one of the wineglasses off the table. He seized one of the pewter candlesticks, as well, knocking the candle out of it.
In the foyer again, about six feet inside the front door, he stood the wineglass on the floor. He placed the bottle of Merlot beside the glass, the red rose beside the bottle.
Like a still-life painting titled Romance.
Outside, a car door slammed.
The front entrance wasn’t locked. Junior quietly turned the knob and pulled gently, letting the door drift inward.
Carrying the candlestick, he raced to the kitchen at the end of the short hall. The door stood open, but he had to enter the room to see Victoria slumped in one of the two chairs at the small dinette.
He slipped behind the door and raised the pewter candlestick over his head. Weighing perhaps five pounds, the object made a formidable bludgeon, almost as good as a hammer.
His heart knocked furiously. He was breathing hard. Strangely, the aroma of dinner cooking, previously delicious, now smelled like blood to him, pungent and raw.
Slow deep breaths. Per Zedd, slow deep breaths. Any state of anxiety, regardless of how powerful, could be ameliorated or even dissipated altogether by taking slow deep breaths, slow deep breaths, and by remembering that each of us has a right to be happy, to be fulfilled, to be free of fear.
Over the final refrain of “I’ll Be Seeing You” came a man’s voice from the foyer, raised quizzically, with perhaps a note of surprise: “Victoria?”
Slow and deep. Slow and deep. Calmer already.
The song ended.
Junior held his breath, listening.
In the brief silence between cuts on the album, he heard the clink of the wineglass against the bottle of Merlot, as the visitor evidently gathered them from the floor.
He had assumed that the dinner guest was Victoria’s lover, but suddenly he realized that this might not be the case. The man might be nothing more than a friend. Her father or a brother. In which case the invitation to romance—posed by the coquettishly arranged wine and rose—would be so wildly inappropriate that the visitor would know at once something was wrong.
Boeotian. Another word learned to enhance vocabulary and never before used. Boeotian. A dull, obtuse, stupid person. He felt very Boeotian all of a sudden.
Just as Sinatra broke into song again, Junior thought he heard a footstep on the wood floor of the hallway, and the creak of a board. The music masked the sounds of the visitor’s approach if, indeed, he was approaching.
Raise high the candlestick. In spite of the masking music, breathe shallowly and through the mouth. Remain poised, ready.
The pewter candlestick was heavy. This would be messy work.
Gore made him sick. He refused to attend movies that dwelt on the consequences of violence, and he had even less of a stomach for blood in real life.
Action. Just concentrate on action and ignore the disgusting aftermath. Remember the runaway train and the bus full of nuns stuck on the tracks. Stay with the train, don’t go back to look at the smashed nuns, just keep moving forward, and everything will be all right.
A sound. Very close. The other side of the open door.
Here, now, the dinner guest, entering the kitchen. He carried the wineglass and the rose in his left hand. The Merlot was tucked under his arm. In his right hand was a small, brightly wrapped gift box.
As he entered, the visitor’s back was to Junior, and he moved toward the table, where dead Victoria sat with her head on her folded arms. She looked for all the world as though she were just resting.
“What’s this?” the man asked her, as Sinatra swooped through “Come Fly with Me.”
Stepping forward lightly, lightly, as he swung the candlestick, Junior saw the dinner guest stiffen, perhaps sensing danger or at least movement, but it was too late. The guy didn’t even have time to turn his head or duck.
The pewter bludgeon slammed into the back of his skull with a hard pock. The scalp tore, blood sprang forth, and the man fell as hard as Victoria had fallen under the influence of a good Merlot, although he went facedown, not faceup as she had done.
Taking no chances, Junior swung the candlestick again, bending down as he did so. The second impact was not as solid as the first, a glancing blow, but effective.
Dropped, the wineglass had shattered. But the bottle of Merlot had survived again, rolling across the vinyl-tile floor until it bumped gently against the base of a cabinet.
Slow deep breathing forgotten, gasping like a drowning swimmer, a sudden sweat dripping from his brow, Junior used one foot to prod the fallen man.
When he got no response, he wedged the toe of his right loafer under the guy’s chest and, with some effort, rolled him onto his back.
Clutching the red rose in his left hand, the brightly wrapped gift box half crushed in his right, Thomas Vanadium lay at Junior’s mercy, with no tricks to perform, no quarter to set dancing across his knuckles, the magic gone.
Chapter 36
THE CRISP CRACKLE of faux flames, the way they made them in the days of radio dramas, back in the 1930s and ’40s, when he was a boy: crumpling cellophane.
Sitting alone at the corner table in the kitchenette of his apartment, Jacob made more fire sounds as he stripped the clear cellophane off a second new deck of playing cards, then off a third and a fourth.
He possessed vast files on tragic fires, and most of them were committed to memory. In Vienna’s magnificent Ring Theater, December 8, 1881, a blaze claimed 850 lives. On May 25, 1887, 200 dead at the Opera Comique, Paris. November 28, 1942, in the Coconut Grove nightclub in Boston—when Jacob was only fourteen years old and already obsessed with humanity’s sorry penchant for destroying itself either by intention or ineptitude—491 suffocated and burned alive on an evening meant for champagne and revelry.
Now, after removing the four decks of cards from the pressboard packs in which they had come, Jacob lined them up side by side on the scarred maple top of the table.
“When the Iroquois Theater in Chicago burned on December 30, 1903,” he said aloud, testing his memory, “during a matinee of Mr. Blue Beard, six hundred two people perished, mostly women and children.”
Standard decks of playing cards are machine packed, always in the same order, according to suits. You can absolutely count on the fact that each deck you open will be assembled in precisely the same order as every other deck you have ever opened or ever will open.
This unfailing consistency of packaging enables card mechanics—professional gamblers, sleight-of-hand magicians—to manipulate a new deck with confidence that they know, starting, where every card can be found in the stack. An expert mechanic with practiced and dexterous hands can appear to shuffle so thoroughly that even the most suspicious observer will be satisfied—yet he will still know exactly where every card is located in the deck. With masterly manipulation, he can place the cards in the order that he wishes, to achieve whatever effect he desires.
“July 6, 1944, in Hartford, Connecticut, a fire broke out in the great tent of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus at two-forty in the afternoon, while six thousand patrons watched the Wallendas, a world-famous high-wire troupe, ascend to begin their act. By three o’clock, the fire burned out, following the collapse of the flaming tent, leaving one hundred sixty-eight dead. Another five hundred people were badly injured, but one thousand circus animals—including forty lions and forty elephants—were not harmed.”
Uncommon dexterity is essential for anyone who hopes to become a highly skilled card mechanic, but i
t is not the sole requirement. A capacity to endure grim tedium while engaging in thousands of hours of patient practice is equally important. The finest card mechanics also exhibit complex memory function of a breadth and depth that the average person would find extraordinary.
“May 14, 1845, in Canton, China, a theater fire killed sixteen hundred seventy. On December 8, 1863, a fire in the Church of La Compana, in Santiago, Chile, left two thousand five hundred and one dead. One hundred fifty perished in a fire at a Paris charity bazaar: May 4, 1897. June 30, 1900, a dock fire in Hoboken, New Jersey, killed three hundred twenty-six….”
Jacob had been born with the requisite dexterity and more than sufficient memory function. His personality disorder—which made him unemployable and guaranteed that his social life would never involve endless rounds of parties—ensured that he would have the free time needed to practice the most difficult techniques of card manipulation until he mastered them.
Because, since childhood, Jacob had been drawn to stories and images of doom, to catastrophe on both the personal and the planetary scale—from theater fires to all-out nuclear war—he had a flamboyant imagination second to none and a colorful if peculiar intellectual life. For him, therefore, the most difficult part of learning card manipulation had been coping with the tedium of practice, but for years he had applied himself diligently, motivated by his love and admiration for his sister, Agnes.
Now he shuffled the first of the four decks precisely as he had shuffled the first deck on Friday evening, and he set it aside.
To have the best chance of becoming a master mechanic, any young apprentice needs a mentor. The art of total card control cannot be learned entirely from books and experimentation.
Jacob’s mentor had been a man named Obadiah Sepharad. They had met when Jacob was eighteen, during a period when he’d been committed to a psychiatric ward for a short time, his eccentricity having been briefly mistaken for something worse.
As Obadiah taught him, he shuffled the remaining three decks.
Neither Agnes nor Edom knew of Jacob’s great skill with cards. He had been discreet about his apprenticeship with Obadiah, and for almost twenty years, he’d resisted the urge to dazzle his siblings with his expertise.
As kids—living in a house that was run like a prison, stifled by the oppressive rule of a morose father who believed that any form of entertainment was an offense against God—they conducted secret card games as their primary act of rebellion. A deck of cards was small enough to hide quickly and to keep hidden successfully even during one of their father’s painstakingly thorough room searches.
When the old man died and Agnes inherited the property, the three of them played cards in the backyard for the first time on the day of his funeral, played openly rather than in secret, almost giddy with freedom. Eventually, when Agnes fell in love and married, Joey Lampion joined their card games, and thereafter, Jacob and Edom enjoyed a greater sense of family than they had ever known before.
Jacob had become a card mechanic for one purpose. Not because he’d ever be a gambler. Not to wow friends with card tricks. Not because the challenge intrigued him. He wanted to be able to give Agnes winning cards once in a while, if she was losing too frequently or needed to have her spirits lifted. He didn’t feed her winning hands often enough to make her suspicious or to make the games less fun for Edom or Joey. He was judicious. The effort he expended—the thousands of hours of practice—was repaid with interest each time Agnes laughed with delight after being dealt a perfect hand.
If Agnes knew that Jacob had been helping her game, she might never play cards with him again. She would not approve of what he had done. Consequently, his great skill as a card mechanic must be forever his secret.
He felt some guilt at this—but only a little. His sister had done so much for him; but jobless, ruled by his obsessions, hobbled by too much of his father’s dour nature, there wasn’t a lot that he could do for her. Just this benign deceit with the cards.
“September 20, 1902, Birmingham, Alabama, church fire—one hundred fifteen dead. March 4, 1908, Collinwood, Ohio, school fire—one hundred seventy-six dead.”
Having shuffled all four stacks of cards, Jacob cut two decks and shuffled the halves together, controlling them exactly as he had controlled them on Friday evening. Then the other two halves.
“New York City, March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire—one hundred forty-six dead.”
Friday, after dinner, when he’d heard enough of Maria’s method of fortune-telling to know that four decks were required, that only every third draw was read, and that aces—especially red aces—were the most propitious cards to receive, Jacob had taken great pleasure in preparing for Barty the most favorable first eight cards that could possibly be dealt. This was a small gift to cheer Agnes, on whose heart Joey’s death weighed as heavily as iron chains.
At first all had gone well. Agnes, Maria, and Edom were rightly amazed. A thrill of wonder and big smiles all around the table. They were enthralled by the astoundingly favorable fall of cards, a breathtaking mathematical improbability.
“April 23, 1940, Natchez, Mississippi, dance-hall fire—one hundred ninety-eight dead. December 7, 1946, Atlanta, Georgia, the Winecoff Hotel fire—one hundred nineteen dead.”
Now, on his kitchenette table, two nights after Maria’s reading, Jacob finished integrating the four decks as he had done Friday in the dining room of the main house. His work completed, he sat for a while, staring at the stack of cards, hesitant to proceed.
“April 5, 1949, Effingham, Illinois, a hospital fire killed seventy-seven.”
In his voice, he heard a tremor that had nothing to do with the hideous deaths in Effingham more than sixteen years previous.