Using paper towels and lemon-scented ooze from the liquid-soap dispenser, he washed his arms and upper body, with special attention to his armpits. He used more paper towels to rinse and dry himself.
No sooner had he shut off the water and finished blotting his torso than he heard someone approaching. The footsteps came not from the hall but through the butler’s pantry, where the china, crystal, and fine silverware were stored.
Grabbing his shirt and undershirt, Fric dropped to the floor and crawled as fast as a skittering skink, away from the butler’s pantry and around the corner of the nearest of three granite-topped center islands.
Atop this particular island were four deep-well French fryers, a griddle large enough to prepare two dozen pancakes side by side, and an acre of work surface. Cowering here, discovered by a grinning Mr. Hachette, Fric could be skinned, gutted, French fried, and eaten while the few people currently in the house snoozed on undisturbed, blissfully unaware that an extraterrestrial gourmet was whipping up a grisly breakfast for itself.
When he dared peek around the corner of the island, he saw not Mr. Hachette but Mrs. McBee.
He was doomed.
Mrs. McBee had dressed for her early-morning drive to Santa Barbara. She crossed the kitchen to her office, entered, and left the door standing open behind her.
She would smell Fric. Smell him, hear him, sense him somehow. She would discover the water beaded in the sink, would open the trash compactor and see the damp paper towels, and would instantly know what he’d done and where he now hid.
Nothing escaped the notice of Mrs. McBee or foiled her powers of deduction.
She would not gut him and French fry him, of course, because she was a good person and entirely human. Instead she would insist upon knowing why he was stripped to the waist in the kitchen, freshly washed, and looking as guilty as a stupid cat with canary crumbs on its lips.
Because she was Ghost Dad’s employee, Fric could have made the argument that technically she worked for him, too, and that he didn’t have to answer her questions. If he resorted to that argument, he would be in deep merde, as Mr. Hachette would say with glee. Mrs. McBee knew that she served in loco parentis, and while she was not quite power mad with that authority, she took it seriously.
Whether Fric concocted a false explanation or tried to get away with telling only part of the truth, Mrs. McBee would see through his deception as clearly as he himself could see through a window, and she would intuitively know everything that he’d been up to at least since he’d awakened in the armchair. Twenty seconds later, with one of his ears pinched firmly between the thumb and forefinger of Mrs. McBee’s right hand, he would find himself standing before the potted palm in the library, sweating like a lowlife scumbag as he tried to explain why he had attempted to assassinate the plant with a double volley of urine.
Minutes thereafter, she would have succeeded in getting him to spill the entire story from Moloch to mirror man to the phone call from Hell. Then there would be no going back.
Even Mrs. McBee, with her scary ability to see through any lie or evasion, would not recognize the truth in this case. His story was too outrageous to be believed. He would sound like a bigger lunatic than any of the uncountable entertainment-industry lunatics who, on visiting Palazzo Rospo, had astonished Mrs. McBee with their lunacy during the past six years.
He didn’t want Mrs. McBee to be disappointed in him or to think that he was mentally deranged. Her opinion of Fric mattered to him.
Besides, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that if he tried to convince anyone that he was in communication with a mirror-traveling guardian angel, he’d be hand-carried into a group-therapy session. The group would be six psychiatrists and he would be the only patient.
Ghost Dad was almost as big on shrinks as he was on spiritual advisers.
Now Mrs. McBee stepped out of her office, closed the door, and paused to look around the kitchen.
Fric ducked back behind the fryer-and-griddle island. He held his breath. He wished that he could as easily close down his pores and prevent them from spewing out his scent.
The main kitchen was not quite a maze to rival the labyrinth of memorabilia in the attic, though it boasted not only six large Sub-Zero refrigerators but also two upright freezers, more ovens of more types than you would find in a bakery, three widely separated cooking areas with a total of twenty high-intensity gas burners, a planning station, a baking station, a clean-up station with four sinks and four dishwashers, three islands, prep tables, and a shitload of restaurant-quality equipment.
A Beverly Hills caterer and forty of his employees could work here with Mr. Hachette and the household staff, with little sense of being crowded. At a party, they prepared, plated, and served three hundred sit-down dinners, on a timely basis, from this space. Fric had seen it happen many times, and it never failed to dazzle him.
If two or even three ordinary people had set out to search the kitchen for him, Fric’s chances of eluding them would have been good. Mrs. McBee was in no way ordinary.
Holding his breath, he thought that he could hear her sniffing the air. Fee-fie-fo-fum.
He was glad that he had not turned on the kitchen lights, though she was certain to smell the fresh water that remained in the central sink.
Footsteps.
Fric almost bolted to his feet, almost announced his presence, which seemed a wiser course of action than waiting here to be found lurking like a sleazeball criminal, stripped to the waist and clearly up to no good.
Then he realized the footsteps were moving away from him.
He heard the butler’s-pantry door swing shut.
The footsteps faded into silence.
Stunned and strangely dismayed to discover that Mrs. McBee was fallible, Fric breathed again.
After a while, he crept to the hall door, which he cracked open. He stood listening.
When he heard the distant hum of the service elevator, he knew that Mrs. McBee and Mr. McBee were descending to the lower garage. Soon they would be off to Santa Barbara.
He waited a few minutes before he ventured from the kitchen to the laundry room in the nearby west wing, which also contained the McBees’ apartment.
Whereas the kitchen was gigantic, the laundry was only huge.
He liked the smell of this place. Detergent, bleach, starch, the lingering scent of hot cotton under a steam iron…
Fric would happily have worn the same jeans and shirt a second day. But he worried that Mr. Truman might notice, and inquire.
Mrs. McBee would have noticed in an instant. She would have insisted on knowing the reason for this slovenliness.
Mr. Truman couldn’t help but be slower on the uptake than Mrs. McBee. Still, he was an ex-cop, so he wouldn’t long overlook day-old, dirty, rumpled clothes.
The possibility might be slim that something evil and supremely slimy was waiting for Fric in his suite, but he didn’t intend to find out anytime soon. He would not return there to change clothes.
Monday had been a scheduled wash day. Mrs. Carstairs, one of the day maids and in fact the laundress, processed laundry one day and returned it promptly to family members and to staff the following morning.
Fric found his pressed blue jeans, pants, and shirts hanging from a cart similar to those with which hotel bellmen move suit bags and luggage. His folded underwear and socks were arranged under the hanging items, on the bed of the cart.
Red-faced, feeling like a pervert for sure, he stripped naked right there in the laundry. He changed into fresh underwear, jeans, and a blue-and-green checkered flannel shirt with a straight-cut tail that allowed it to be worn out, Hawaiian style.
He transferred his wallet and the folded photograph from his old jeans before dropping the soiled garments into the collection basket under the laundry chute that served the second and third floors.
Emboldened by having successfully toileted, bathed, and changed clothes under these desperate wartime conditions, Fric retu
rned to the kitchen.
He entered cautiously, expecting to find Mrs. McBee waiting for him: Ah, laddie, did ya truly think I was such a fool as to be that easily deceived?
She had not returned.
From the appliance pantry, he fetched a small stainless-steel cart with two shelves. He traveled the kitchen, loading the cart with items that he would need in his deep and special secret place.
He considered including a six-pack of Coke among his provisions, but warm cola didn’t taste good. Instead, he selected a four-pack of Stewart’s Diet Orange ’N Cream soda, which was fabulous even at room temperature, and six twelve-ounce bottles of water.
After he put a few apples and a bag of pretzels on the cart, he realized his mistake. When hiding from a demented psycho killer who had the sharply honed senses of a stalking panther, eating noisy food was no wiser than singing Christmas songs to pass the time.
Fric replaced the apples and pretzels with bananas, a box of chocolate-covered doughnuts, and several chewy granola bars.
He added a quart-size Hefty OneZip plastic bag in which to store the peels after he ate the fruit. Left in the open air, peels would give off an intense banana scent as they darkened. According to the movies, every serial killer had a sense of smell keener than that of a wolf. Banana peels might be the death of Fric if he didn’t stow them in an airtight container.
A roll of paper towels. Several foil-wrapped moist towelettes. Even in hiding, he would want to be neat.
From a cupboard filled with Rubbermaid containers, he chose a pair of one-quart, soft-plastic jars with screw-on lids. They would serve in place of the library palm tree.
Mr. Hachette, being a deeply unstable person, had stocked the kitchen with ten times more cutlery than would ever be needed even if the entire staff developed knife-throwing acts and ran off to work in carnival sideshows. Three wall racks and four drawers offered enough blades to arm the entire coconut-rich nation of Tuvalu.
Fric selected a butcher knife. Proportionate to his size, the blade was as large as a machete—scary to look at, but unwieldy.
Instead, he chose a smaller but formidable knife with a six-inch blade, a wickedly pointed tip, and an edge sharp enough to split a human hair. The thought of cutting a person with it made him queasy.
He put the knife on the lower shelf of the cart and covered it with a dishtowel.
For the time being, he could think of nothing additional that he needed from the kitchen. Mr. Hachette—busy shopping and no doubt also shedding his skin for a new set of scales—wasn’t due to slither back to Palazzo Rospo for hours yet, but Fric remained eager to get out of the chef’s domain.
Using the service elevator would be too dangerous because it was in the west wing, not far from Mr. Truman’s apartment. He hoped to avoid the security chief. The public elevator, toward the east end of the north hall, would be safer.
In sudden guilty haste, he pushed the cart through the swinging door into the hallway, turned right, and nearly collided with Mr. Truman.
“You’re up early this morning, Fric.”
“Ummm, things to do, things, you know, ummm,” Fric muttered, silently cursing himself for sounding devious, guilty, and more than a little like an absentminded Hobbit.
“What’s all this?” Mr. Truman asked, indicating the stuff piled on the cart.
“Yeah. For my room, things I need, you know, stuff for my room.” Fric shamed himself; he was pathetic, transparent, stupid. “Just some soda and snacks and stuff,” he added, and he wanted to smack himself upside the head.
“You’re going to put one of the maids out of work.”
“Gee, no, that’s not what I want.” Shut up, shut up, shut up! he warned himself, yet he couldn’t resist adding, “I like the maids.”
“Are you all right, Fric?”
“Sure. I’m all right. Are you all right?”
Frowning at the items on the cart, Mr. Truman said, “I’d like to talk to you a little more about those calls.”
Glad that he had covered the knife with a dishtowel, Fric said, “What calls?”
“From the heavy breather.”
“Oh. Yeah. The breather.”
“Are you sure he didn’t say anything to you?”
“Breathed. He just, you know, breathed.”
“The odd thing is—none of the calls you told me about are on the computerized telephone log.”
Well, of course, now that Fric understood these calls were being made by a supernatural, mirror-walking being who referred to himself as a guardian angel and who only used the idea of a telephone, he was not surprised that they weren’t recorded as entries in the log. He also wasn’t any longer puzzled about why Mr. Truman hadn’t picked up on the call the previous night, even though it had rung just about forever: Mysterious Caller always knew where Fric was—train room, wine cellar, library—and using his uncanny powers and only the idea of a phone, he made Fric’s line ring not throughout the house but only in the room where Fric could hear it.
Fric longed to explain this crazy situation to Mr. Truman and to reveal all the weird events of the previous evening. Even as he worked up the courage to spill his guts, however, he thought of the six psychiatrists who would be eager to earn hundreds of thousands of bucks by keeping him on a couch, talking about the stress of being the only child of the biggest movie star in the world, until he either exploded into bloody pieces or escaped to Goose Crotch.
“Don’t get me wrong, Fric. I’m not saying you invented those calls. In fact, I’m sure you didn’t.”
Clenched tightly around the cart handle, Fric’s hands had grown damp. He blotted them on his pants—and realized that he should not have done so. Every crummy, sleazy criminal in the world probably got sweaty palms in the presence of a cop.
“I’m sure you didn’t,” Mr. Truman continued, “because last night someone rang me up on one of my private lines, and it didn’t show on the log, either.”
Surprised by this news, Fric stopped blotting his hands and said, “You heard from the breather?”
“Not the breather, no. Someone else.”
“Who?”
“Probably a wrong number.”
Fric looked at the security chief’s hands. He couldn’t tell whether or not they were sweaty.
“Evidently,” Mr. Truman continued, “something’s wrong with the telephone-log software.”
“Unless he’s like a ghost or something,” Fric blurted.
The expression that crossed Mr. Truman’s face was hard to read. He said, “Ghost? What makes you say that?”
On the trembling edge of divulging all, Fric remembered that his mother had once been in a booby hatch. She had stayed there only ten days, and she hadn’t been chop-’em-up-with-an-ax crazy or anything as bad as that.
Nevertheless, if Fric started babbling about recent freaky events, Mr. Truman would surely recall that Freddie Nielander had spent some time in a clinic for the temporarily wacko. He would think, Like mother, like son.
For sure, he would immediately contact the biggest movie star in the world on location in Florida. Then Ghost Dad would send in a powerful SWAT team of psychiatrists.
“Fric,” Mr. Truman pressed, “what did you mean—ghost?”
Shoveling manure over the seed of truth that he’d spoken, hoping to grow a half-convincing lie from it, Fric said, “Well, you know, my dad keeps a special phone for messages from ghosts. I just meant like maybe one of them called the wrong line.”
Mr. Truman stared at him as though trying to decide whether he could be as stupid as he was pretending to be.
Not as great an actor as his father, Fric knew he couldn’t long stand up to interrogation by an ex-cop. He was so nervous that in a minute he’d need to take a leak in one of the Rubbermaid jars.
“Ummm, well, gotta go, things to do, things up in my room, you know,” he muttered, once more sounding like a cousin from the feeble-minded branch of the Hobbit clan.
He swung the cart around Mr. Truman
and pushed it east along the main hall. He didn’t look back.
CHAPTER 50
THE DOME LIGHT ATOP OUR LADY OF ANGELS Hospital was a golden beacon. High above the dome, at the top of the radio mast, the red aircraft-warning lamp winked in the gray mist, as if the storm were a living beast and this were its malevolent Cyclopean eye.
In the elevator, on the way from the garage to the fifth floor, Ethan listened to a lushly orchestrated version of a classic Elvis Costello number tricked up with violins and fulsome French horns. This cable-hung cubicle, ascending and descending twenty-four hours a day, was a little outpost of Hell in perpetual motion.
The physicians’ lounge on the fifth floor, to which he’d been given directions by phone, was nothing more than a dreary windowless vending-machine room with a pair of Formica-topped tables in the center. The orange plastic items that surrounded the tables qualified as chairs no more than the room deserved the grand name on its door.
Having arrived five minutes early, Ethan fed coins to one of the machines and selected black coffee. When he sipped the stuff, he knew what death must taste like, but he drank it anyway because he’d slept only four or five hours and needed the kick.
Dr. Kevin O’Brien arrived precisely on time. About forty-five, handsome, he had the vaguely haunted look and the well-suppressed but still-apparent nervous edge of one who had spent two-thirds of his life in arduous scholarship, only to find that the hammers wielded by HMOs, government bureaucracy, and greedy trial attorneys were daily degrading his profession and destroying the medical system to which he’d dedicated his life. His eyes were pinched at the corners. He frequently licked his lips. Stress lent a gray tint to his pallor. Unfortunately for his peace of mind, he seemed to be a bright man who would not much longer be able to delude himself into believing that the quicksand under his feet was actually solid ground.
Although he was not Duncan Whistler’s personal internist, Dr. O’Brien had been the physician on duty when Dunny had gone flatline. He had overseen resuscitation procedures and had made the final call to cease heroic efforts. The death certificate carried his signature.