Body Language (30 page)

Perhaps the priest had taken this tack in order to promote the Big Lie, rewriting the facts of Suzanne’s life in hopes that her death might lend credence to his own faith. Did he really believe the nonsense he preached? Or was he merely toying with us? Perhaps his words were chosen to gall Miriam Westerman, to rub her face in the victory he enjoyed, having won the right to preside at this public spectacle. I’d hold it to the man’s credit if, in fact, his rhetoric was inspired by petty pride instead of piety.

Whatever his motivation, Miriam reacted predictably. She fidgeted and fumed across the aisle, and at several junctures in the sermon, she appeared ready to stand and dispute the priest’s words. I weighed this prospect with mixed emotions. The outburst would lend a nifty twist to the tiresome blathering, but it would only upset those who had genuinely come to grieve. In any event, Miriam summoned the self-restraint to stew privately.

The emotions of others in the church ran the gamut, exemplified by those who sat in front of me—Hazel sobbed openly, Joey sniffled, and Thad listened dully with dry-eyed stoicism. Most of the congregation sat as I did, quietly respectful, but lacking any display of sentiment. It was impossible, of course, to read the minds of the hundreds who filled the pews that morning. The people of Dumont felt the loss of Suzanne in differing contexts. To a few, she was family; to others, a friend; to most, an influential business figure. To some degree, her death was mourned by all—all, I speculated, save one. Chances were, there was a killer in the church, miming grief. But who?

I was tempted to take out my pen and make a few notes, but the priest’s words distracted me, and I thought it ill-mannered to flaunt my disbelief.

“Let us pray, then,” concluded Father Winter, “that our dearly departed sister”—he filled in the blank—“Suzanne—will look down upon us with favor from her heavenly home, where she enjoys eternal happiness with all the saints, with the Blessed Virgin Mary, with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Amid a smatter of amens, the priest returned to the altar and prepared to utter the long formula that would turn bread, he claimed, into God.

The rest of the service was familiar and uneventful, save for the awkward logistics of distributing Communion to the throngs who snaked forward, squeezing past Suzanne’s casket. When at last it was over, the organ thundered a recessional, and Father Winter led the casket back to the doors of the church, altar boys churning clouds of incense in its wake. Those seated in the front pews followed him, so I was among those first to leave.

Coughing back tears, caused not by grief but by the pungent smoke that engulfed us, I slowly made my way along the center aisle toward the open doors, eager to breathe the clean, cold air. Everyone turned as we passed, and it felt as if the hundreds of unknown faces were looking at me, but of course it was Suzanne’s remains that were the focus of their attention.

The organ continued its somber march, overlaid by horn sounds that mimicked the trumpets of doomsday. While the organist’s performance was reasonably skilled, the trumpeter’s was not, sounding eerily dissonant above the stately melody, more like a car alarm than music. As we drew nearer the door and under the choir loft, the offensive horn noise grew louder, and I realized that it
was
a car alarm. In the next instant, I recognized that it was
my
car alarm.

Good God. Fishing in my pocket for the key fob, I rushed ahead of the procession and out the door, preparing to silence the damn thing.

Out in the parking lot, across the street from where the hearse and limousines idled at the curb, I saw a couple of squad cars and a group of sheriff’s deputies near my car, presumably trying to quell the disturbance. Jogging toward them, I pushed the fob button, and as soon as I was in range, the honking ceased. Spotting Doug Pierce near the back of my car, I approached him, mortified, ready to offer profuse apologies.

But then I noticed that the cops wouldn’t care that I had silenced the blaring alarm, for, in fact, they had tripped it. My trunk gaped open, its lock picked by a police locksmith. Pierce held something in his arms, bundled in a blanket. Suddenly apprehensive, I asked, “What’s going on, Doug?”

Before answering, he turned to mumble instructions to his deputies. While I waited, the congregation poured out of the church and, attracted by the commotion in the parking lot, herded past the hearse and crowded toward us. Pierce turned back to me and unfurled the blanket. There in his arms was the missing artichoke finial, the bloodstained king-thing that had killed Suzanne Quatrain. He told me, “Just before the funeral, we got an anonymous tip from a man, traced to a phone booth. He told us the weapon was in your trunk.”

A gasp went up from the nearby onlookers, who quickly spread word through the crowd that Suzanne’s killer had been caught.

“I’m sorry, Mark,” Pierce told me. “The DA wants you booked on suspicion of murder.” Then he began reciting my rights.

Neil, Parker, Roxanne, Carl, Thad, and Hazel all stood behind me, astonished, voicing words of support. Roxanne leaned forward and said into my ear, “I’ll do everything I can, Mark. I’ll meet you downtown.” Meaning, of course, that I was about to be hauled away.

I offered my wrists to Pierce, but he shook his head, telling me, “Just get in the car.” He opened the back door of one of the squads. As I got in, he stood between me and the crowd, giving instructions to the deputy who would drive us to the sheriff’s department. He was about to close the door for me and get into the front seat, when Thad poked his head inside the car.

“Mark,” he said, sounding panicky, “what’s happening? They can’t do this.”

Before I could say anything in response, Miriam Westerman burst through the crowd and nabbed Thad by the elbow, telling him, “The courts should have an easy time of it
now
, Ariel, deciding whose guidance is best for your future!”

Then Pierce closed my door, took the front seat, and told the driver, “Let’s get out of here.”

I
HAD ANOTHER DREAM
, which began as a replay of an earlier one.

I’m a boy of nine, visiting the house on Prairie Street for the first time. It’s the second day of my visit, and I’ve met everyone in the household except my oldest cousin, Mark Quatrain, who’s returning from college. Then somebody opens the door, and I see him. He’s very handsome, with wavy hair, and he’s wearing tan pants. Everyone else is hugging him; I want to, but think I shouldn’t. Trying to think of something clever, I tell him, “We’ve got the same name.” He smiles and says, “How about that?” Then he musses my hair with his hand.

Later that afternoon, I’m in Joey’s room, and I stroll out into the hall and look in on Mark. There he is with his shirt off, unpacking a suitcase and sorting through his records. Seeing me, he says, “I’ll find some Mozart.” He kneels on the floor, reaching for an album that slipped behind the stereo. His backside is toward me, and I can’t take my eyes off him. I feel lost for a moment; then I walk over to him and just, well…
touch
him.

Mark gets up fast, laughing, being nice. He says, “Go ahead. Touch me.”

I put my arms around his waist and squeeze him against me. He looks at the ceiling with his mouth open, and he puts his hands in my hair, and he pulls, and it sort of hurts but feels good anyway. He says, “I want to touch you, too, Mark.”

So I take one of his hands and put it between my legs, and I feel warm and hard there. He looks into my eyes and tells me how green they are, and I laugh, telling him, “Show me your cock. Fuck my mouth.”

I’m not little anymore, but his age, eighteen. We’re the same height, same build, same name, same khaki pants. There’s a twin-thing going on, and it heats up fast. We’re on the floor, groping each other. “Mark, oh, Mark,” we whisper.

So far, everything is happening the way it did in the earlier dream. But then, things start to get different.

“Hey,” says someone, popping into the room. But I can’t see him, and I don’t care—I’m busy with my cousin, my twin. “Hey!” he repeats. “Back off, Mark. That guy’s straight. Worse yet, he’s a rapist and a murderer. I don’t know what he’s up to, but he’s dangerous.”

Wearing the same khaki pants that Mark and I wear, Parker walks over to where we are sprawled on the floor together, and he stands over me. The way he moves, the way the crisp fabric hugs his butt, everything about him—his body language—reminds me of my cousin Mark, just as it did on the day when I hired Parker. And now I’m doubly aroused, with my fantasy-cousin lying there at my side, with my hot managing editor straddling my shoulders. “Besides,” he tells me, reaching a hand down to me, “that guy’s just a kid. You need a man, Mark. I’m here for you.”

As he pulls me to my feet, I’m no longer nine, no longer eighteen, but an adult. Parker and I are now the same age, same height, same build, same khaki pants. There’s sort of a twin-thing going on, and it heats up fast while Mark Quatrain watches us, grinning, lying on the floor. Parker and I share a long, deep kiss as our hands fumble to unbuckle each other’s belts. Then I feel Parker’s hand lift my balls, and I moan at his touch. With his other hand, he combs his fingers through my hair, mussing it, and my penis stiffens to the point of pain. Watching us, lying there, my cousin Mark unzips his own pants and starts masturbating.

Parker tells me, “Rub your dick in my hair,” and he kneels in front of me, thrusting his head at my groin. As instructed, I slide my penis through his curls and instinctively grab his hair with both of my hands, forcing his face to nuzzle deeper into my groin. “Oh, Mark,” he groans, “I’m gonna come.”

But the voice didn’t come from the man kneeling in front of me. It came from the man lying on the floor. It is no longer my cousin Mark, but Parker, in the first throes of orgasm. “This is all I’ve ever wanted,” he tells me, shooting semen that arcs into the air, then lands in puddles that disappear within the wrinkles of his crumpled khakis.

Spontaneously, my testicles clench, and I feel the rush of orgasm pulse through my penis into the hair of the man kneeling before me. My fingers are buried in Mark Quatrain’s curls, and as I come, I pull. He yelps, enjoying the pain, ejaculating at my feet. Breathless, I lift my hands from his head and discover strands of his hair wrapped around my fingers.

He looks up at me, smiling with woozy bliss.

I crouch to kiss him, slipping deeply asleep.

Waking in the dark, I glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it was shortly after six. The near silence of early morning was broken only by the sound of the furnace blower and by a low chatter that resembled the grinding of teeth. The weather had turned bitterly cold again, so cold that the brick walls of the house seemed to grate their own mortar in defiance of the gelid outdoor air.

The bed was warm and comforting, heated, no doubt, by the passions of my dream. The dream, though bizarre, was highly pleasurable, and I took it as a signal from my subconscious that despite the horrendous turn of events following Suzanne’s funeral the week before, I could now sleep more easily.

The murder charges against me didn’t stick. While tests confirmed that the finial found in my car was in fact the murder weapon, it obviously had been planted in my trunk. Even Dumont’s hotdogging DA, Harley Kaiser, itching for a conviction, conceded that I was framed. Roxanne convincingly argued that if I had committed the crime, I’d simply have burned the finial in any of the house’s fireplaces; the sheriff himself, Doug Pierce, confirmed that he’d seen several of the fireplaces in full blaze on Christmas Day. What’s more, if I
had
been dumb enough to carry the bloodied king-thing around in my car, I wouldn’t have been smart enough to clean off all its fingerprints, a task that someone had scrupulously tended to. No, it just didn’t add up, so the finial in my trunk could not be used to prove me guilty of Suzanne’s murder. But it didn’t exonerate me, either, and Kaiser ordered me not to leave town—I was still on a short list of suspects.

Following my arrest, both Neil and Roxanne spent the full week in Dumont, Neil for moral support, Roxanne on legal matters. Her first order of business was to clear me with the DA. Aside from the fact that he couldn’t build a strong case against me, Roxanne shrewdly reminded him that I would soon be taking over as publisher of the
Register
and that it would not be in the best interests of his next election to antagonize me. He may not have liked the tone of her reminder, but he was smart enough to know that she was right.

Less easily handled was the matter of Thad’s guardianship. As Doug Pierce had warned, Miriam Westerman proceeded with her court action to take responsibility for the boy, and immediately after my arrest, she was granted temporary custody, alleging that my dubious character posed a danger to the child. Roxanne quickly set the wheels in motion to appeal that ruling and have Thad remanded to my permanent custody, but she cautioned me that the process could be time-consuming, the outcome iffy.

With the crisis of my arrest dispatched, and with the custody question temporarily at bay, both Roxanne and Neil returned to Chicago last Sunday, needing to get back to their regular jobs. I felt guilty enough that I had not yet lived up to my end of the “arrangement” with Neil, having spent no time with him in Chicago since my move north during Christmas week. It was now January twelfth, a Wednesday (eighteen days since Suzanne’s murder, nine since her funeral), and Neil had already spent three consecutive weekends in Dumont. Since I was now under orders not to leave town, he’d be returning for a fourth.

So all was unusually quiet that early morning as I lay in bed mulling my dream. Neil and Roxanne were back in Chicago. Thad was with Miriam Westerman. The only others sharing the house with me now were Hazel, in her quarters downstairs near the kitchen, and Parker, asleep down the hall from me in the room that had once been Mark Quatrain’s.

Thinking of Parker—not the intruder who had nudged into my dream, but the real person sleeping in my cousin’s room—I was grateful he was there in the house. He’d been steadfast in his efforts to help me through the difficult events that had transpired since my arrival in Dumont, and he’d proven himself a tireless worker during his many days of unpaid research in the
Register
’s morgue. Initially, our plan was that he would stay at the house until he was able to get a lease on a suitable place of his own, but the search for alternate housing hadn’t been mentioned since his arrival, and I wondered if Parker entertained notions that the living arrangement on Prairie Street might become permanent.