Box Nine (19 page)

Lenore starts to panic a little and fights against it. “Just calm down, now, Vicky. Just do what Darken says, now.”

But Vicky gets worse, her arms start to flail and her body seems to buck away from the pole like she was losing all motor control.

“Who gave you the medicine, Vicky?” Lenore yells, now frantic. “Who gave you the drug, Vicky?”

Vicky hangs out from the pole with one hand on a spike. Her head is quaking on her shoulders. Lenore sees a small thin stream of blood seeping slowly from her right ear.

“Who?” she screams.

Vicky's full mouth starts to vibrate, the tremble of the lips and all the skin within about a half inch of the lips, begins to increase geometrically, until the bottom half of her face is a sickening, surreal blur.

Then the vibration ceases all at once and her tongue comes in and out several times, complete with a white, foamy cover. Lenore takes a step forward, her eyes focused in on the mouth. It opens, trembles barely, comes together, and opens again to form a single word:
Mingo.

Then, immediately, the convulsions set in again, and this time the whole body is affected. A hand flies up into the air and the gun explodes. Lenore sinks into a shooting crouch, arms extended up, gun sighted and ready to fire, but she realizes before squeezing off that the girl is just helpless to her own muscles and firing harmlessly in the air.

“For Christ sake,” she hears, and then Zarelli is beside her trying to yank her backward.

“You dumb fuck,” she screams, and refocuses on the pole just in time to see Vicky unconsciously drawing down on Zarelli. Then she hears that unmistakable noise, that one-in-a-million sound, gun-shot. Lenore takes air in and before she can think, she pumps out two bullets. Both of them enter Vicky's chest left of the breastbone. Heart shots.

Vicky's body heaves, weaves backward away from the pole, hangs a second, and then drops, dead weight, a mute stone, to the ground.

Things seem to start moving in a spastic, slow motion for Lenore. She hears a voice from the police line behind her yell, “Hold fire, hold fire,” and it sounds like it's coming from the top of a third-world mountain, hundreds of miles away. She looks down at Zarelli, who's lying flat on his back, arms crossed and up, covering his face. There's no blood. He's unharmed.

Lenore runs to the body, instinctively puts her fingers to Vicky's throat, waits the useless extra half-minute. There's no beat, no pulse, no trace of an even fleeting life. The body is in an odd position, as if Lenore had discovered it in bed, in the middle of a humid night, trying any placement of arms and legs in an effort to find comfort.

Lenore ignores procedure and rolls the body onto its back so that she won't have to view the gaping hole of the bullets' exit path. She can't help seeing the two entrance's bull's-eyes, however. And then she sees something else. Situated in Vicky's cleavage, lodged securely between her breasts, is the letter
Q.
It looks like a jewel, a small charm that fell from a broken and lost necklace.

Lenore hears the running footfall coming down the alley behind her. She takes the Q from Vicky's chest, hides it in her hand, feels the rubbery, shiver-making texture of the item. She swallows hard, rises to her feet, and turns to face the troops.

Chapter Fifteen

P
eirce sits in the Swarms' library, surrounded by books. The room is in darkness. She hasn't bothered to turn on a light. She finds herself wondering what will be done with all the books. Will they be donated to some library or one of the city's colleges? Will they be inventoried and appraised and then sold off to some dealer, the proceeds given to the state?

She'd like to think of the books as orphans, but their size and bulkiness and lack of color prevent her. They have the look of textbooks, tomes that only a dozen people in the world can read the whole of.

The Swanns had no other family. Just each other. Why did two people need such an enormous house? A house like this should be filled with a noisy, multigenerational clan. It should be filled, regularly, with the sound of huge dinners that take hours to prepare and even longer to eat.

The silence in this place must have been awful.

Then again, maybe she's got it all wrong. Maybe the house was like a huge fortress for the two of them. Leo and Inez locked up in paradise, every need taken care of and plenty of room to spread out.

It's possible. She can picture herself making a home in a place like this. With Victor. Rolling around on the oriental carpets, foolish in this enormous private palace. The thought makes her reach for the recorder.

A little Alka-Seltzer and the girl is as good as new. You're not going to believe this but Charlotte is getting hungry again. You're either home by now or on your way. The Mrs. has supper on the table, right? What'll it be tonight, Victor? It really doesn't matter. She's such a great cook, everything's wonderful, huh? [
Pause
] I said I wouldn't do this. And besides, now that I think of it, you've got a City Council meeting. So you're probably grabbing a quick sandwich in the office with the amazing Carol, secretary of the decade. It's getting pretty pathetic, Victor, when I'm losing it over your wife
and
secretary. Swear to me that all you guys are doing right now is going over new budget proposals. [
Pause
] I'm sitting in the library of the lovely but dead Leo and Inez Swann, in the Swann mansion up on Grimaldi Drive. In the ritzy Windsor Hills section. I knew I should've been a real estate broker, boss. Let's see—“This charming fifteen-room Tudor …” No, wait. “Charming” is the wrong word here. “Stately.” You'd have to use “stately.” I read the Sunday real estate ads. Sometimes they call the houses up here “magnificent.” It's a kick just walking through a place like this. A little spooky in this case, you know? I was a poor kid, Victor, grew up on the south side of the district, all those good blue-collar folks that return you to office year after year. Now and then, my old man would drive me and my brothers and sisters up around here. We'd take a quick look and bang—out again. You always had the feeling up here that there were servants looking out the windows at your old broken-down station wagon, that there were these butlers, hidden behind enormous drapes or something, with a gold-plated telephone receiver in their hand, calling the cops. Like “Intruder alert. South-siders trespassing in Windsor.” This was where all the Yankee doctors and judges and the publisher of
The Spy
lived. It was like another world. A place I was always curious about, but scared of at the same time. This place where all the power in the whole city lived. And as a kid, maybe I got this from my dad, I don't know, but it was never good power. Never something that was going to make things better. At least not for us. And sitting here now, in this house that's ten times too big for the Swanns, I feel the exact same way. All over again. [
Pause
] Have you ever been in this house, Victor? Well, I guess you've been in a lot like this one. I know you've had dinner up at
The Spy
publisher's house, what's his name, Welch. My old man used to say about him, “More money than God and a whole lot slicker.” You know, for a second I thought it was funny that you didn't live up here. Mayor of Quinsigamond and all. But then it hit me. You're really just a civil servant like me. We're in the same class, Victor. There's one thing we've got in common. I felt like a criminal just walking up the path to this place. I clipped my badge to my belt in case any neighbors were watching. We've still got the yellow police line practically wrapped around the whole house, roping it off. I ducked underneath instead of breaking it, but I'll tell you, something about that yellow plastic material. I hate touching it. It's like it's infected with death or something. It's like this glaring symbol, you know. Don't cross this line, stiff on the other side. [
Pause
] I'll tell you one thing, these two had expensive tastes. There had to be money in at least one of their families, and I'm betting Leo. He just looks the type. And you don't live like this by being a researcher or scientist or whatever. At least I don't think so. I know there've been three different investigations though this place and teams of lab guys and all, but I wanted to take a look for myself. It's weird, Victor. It's like living in some old English movie, I swear. How do you live in a place like this? Yeah, I know the answer to that. But it's like, you walk into this huge, I mean enormous, foyer and it's all this shining ancient wood everywhere. Walnut or mahogany. I don't know this kind of crap. But the walls are so glossy you could go blind. And on either side of the foyer are these two stairways, wide enough for about six people across. And they both run up and meet at this balcony. And out in front of the balcony is this gigantic chandelier. I mean they had to have gotten this thing out of some landmark hotel in New York. [
Pause
] Listen. I got here hours ago, Victor. And I spent the first hour just wandering through. Not touching anything. Not even looking for anything. Just taking it all in. Just trying to see if I can get a better feeling for what kind of people Leo and Inez were. For me, it's always best to work from instinct. I know you probably disagree with that. You're the ultimate manager, right? Everything scheduled. Look at all the options. No, all the proposals. Weigh it all. Use a system. See what fits best. Maybe you're right. I mean, look how far I've gotten in this life by following my feelings. I can bitch and moan with the best of them, Victor. I'd like to live in this house for just one week. With you. Like a married couple. Like Leo and Inez. Me, in the gourmet kitchen with the butcher-block island and the overhead copper rack for hanging pots and pans that don't look like they've ever been cooked in, and I'm in a white terry-cloth robe, and I'm packing the kids' lunches for the day, straightening your tie, giving you a little tip on how to deal with the school committee. [
Pause
] The Swanns both had a library, a study. I'm in Inez's right now. I spent an hour in Leo's. A man's room. Big power desk. Dark leather chairs. The walls lined with books. Inez's room is different. In all the ways you'd guess. Pastels. Antiques. Her desk is so small. Too small for me. Prints on the walls. Who's that guy? French, I think. Painted all the water lilies? Anyway, I've been sitting here, my legs curled up underneath me, on this small uncomfortable couch. I've been trying to picture them, Leo and Inez, alone, late at night, in this ark of a house. Two people alone in this giant house. They're in their studies. They're separated. They're reading, writing down notes, trying to think. Figuring out work problems. And then I think about Lehmann telling us at the briefing about their dinner with Gennaro Pecci. At Fiorello's. And it doesn't make sense. Doesn't go together. I think Leo and Inez were the type of folks who would have turned up their noses at a local wise guy like Pecci. Even if he is second or third generation. And I know drugs and money make the weirdest kind of bedfellows. But the Pecci angle doesn't make sense to me. Even if it fills in a lot of holes. [
Pause
] I pulled every book down off Inez's bookshelf, Victor. A lot of old books alongside new ones. Some of them might be rare or something. I don't know books. They have names like
A
Psycholinguistic Study of the Angkor Wat “Wild Child”
and
The Berlin Symposium on HyperKinesics
and, yeah, here's a good one,
A Statistical Analysis of Leberzunge-Therapy, Buchenwald, 1943.
Plus a bunch of stuff in German and French and maybe Russian that I can't even pronounce. Real page-turners. Best-sellers. Now, I'm taking it for granted that somebody already did this, looked through every book. But in one book, love this name,
Deconstructing the Fifth: Advances and Abuses Within the Cohn Group's use of “J.M.'s Langley-Catacomb Cocktail,” 1949–1950
, there was a bookmark, actually just a stub of paper used as a bookmark. It looks like the bottom half of one of those little pink “While You Were Our” slips. Printed, in pencil, in these small, perfect block letters is the word “Paraclete.” I don't know if that rings any bells for you, but I've got nothing. [
Pause
] It's getting creepy in here, Victor. I'll talk to you later.

Chapter Sixteen

E
phraim Beck's Mystery Bookstore has operated in the same location for over one hundred years. It has not always been exclusively a mystery-book store. It has, on the other hand, always been owned by the Beck family. The Becks are something of a local myth in Quinsigamond—the bloodline cursed with the incurable affliction of bibliomania.

Ezekiel Beck, Ephraim's grandfather, started the store around 1890, according to the myth, when his Victorian home was structurally threatened by the sheer weight of his library. He was a genuine book nut, manuscript mad, addicted to bound paper and ink. The floors of his house were buckling, the walls beginning to bulge. His wife warned of divorce and scandal. Zeke quit his growing law practice, moved the family to the second and third floors of the house, and set up shop on the first. His logic was that this would stabilize and maybe even reduce the number of volumes under his roof.

He did not physically alter the family home in any way. In some instances, he did not even bother to move furniture. The dining room, for instance, was turned into the philosophy section, and Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the rest overran the tables, china cabinets, and buffet. The pantry was devoted to poetry, and Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Whitman lined the shelves that had housed sugar and flour and coffee. The small music alcove was crammed with theology. The front parlor loaded with contemporary fiction, a rolltop proprietor's desk, and a tin-scrolled cash register.

Ephraim, the grandson and last of the bloodline, fifty years old now and still a bachelor, lives in three rooms on the second floor of the house. The top floor is used for storage. And the first floor, still outfitted in its original Victorian decor, houses an extensive and often idiosyncratic collection of mystery literature, from rare Poe first editions to fading pulp paperbacks. Ephraim switched to an exclusively mystery stock the week after his father died. He issues a catalogue twice a year that he mails to customers “as far away as Melbourne.”