One Door Away From Heaven (5 page)

Enjoying the girl’s perplexity, Micky shrugged. “I’m not sure I could have resisted him, either.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, stop teasing the child,” Geneva said. “You’ll have to forgive me, Leilani. I’ve had these memory problems now and then, ever since I was shot in the head. A few wires got scrambled up here”—she tapped her right temple—“and sometimes old movies seem as real to me as my own past.”

“Could I have more lemonade?” Leilani asked.

“Of course, dear.” Geneva poured from a glass pitcher that dripped icy condensation.

Micky watched their guest take a long drink. “Don’t try to fool me, mutant girl. You’re not so cool that you can roll with that one.”

Putting down the lemonade, Leilani relented: “Oh, all right. I’ll bite. When were you shot in the head, Mrs. D?”

“This July third, just passed, made eighteen years.”

“Aunt Gen and Uncle Vernon owned a little corner grocery,” Micky explained, “which is like being targets in a shooting gallery if it’s on the
wrong
corner.”

“The day before the July Fourth holiday,” Geneva said, “you sell lots of lunchmeats and beer. It’s mostly a cash business.”

“And someone wanted the cash,” Leilani guessed.

“He was a perfect gentleman about it,” Geneva recalled.

“Except for the shooting.”

“Well, yes, except for that,” Geneva agreed. “But he came up to the cash register with this lovely smile. Well dressed, soft-spoken. He says, ‘I’d be really grateful if you’d give me the money in the register, and please don’t forget the large bills under the drawer.’”

Leilani squinted with righteous indignation. “So you refused to give it to him.”

“Heavens, no, dear. We emptied the register and all but thanked him for sparing us the trouble of paying income tax on it.”

“And he shot you anyway?”

“He shot my Vernon twice, and
apparently
then he shot me.”

“Apparently?”

“I remember him shooting Vernon. I wish I didn’t, but I do.” Earlier, sadness had cast a gray shadow across Geneva’s face at the counterfeit memory of her anguish-filled love affair with a heroin junkie; but now a flush of happiness pinked her features, and she smiled. “Vernon was a wonderful man, as sweet as honey in the comb.”

Micky reached for her aunt’s hand. “I loved him, too, Aunt Gen.”

To Leilani, Geneva said, “I miss him so much, even after all these years, but I can’t cry over him anymore, because every memory, even that awful day, reminds me of how sweet he was, how loving.”

“My brother, Lukipela—he was like that.” In spite of this tribute to her brother, Leilani was not inspired to match Geneva’s smile. Instead, the girl’s cocky cheerfulness melted into melancholy. Her clear eyes clouded toward a more troubled shade of blue.

For a moment, Micky perceived in their young visitor a quality that chilled her because it was like a view of the darker ravines of her own interior landscape: a glimpse of reckless anger, despair, a brief revelation of a sense of worthlessness that the girl would deny but that from personal experience Micky recognized too well.

No sooner had Leilani’s defenses cracked than they mended. Her eyes glazed with emotion at the mention of her brother, but now they focused. Her gaze rose from her deformed hand to smiling Geneva, and she smiled, too. “Mrs. D, you said
apparently
the gunman shot you.”

“Well, I know he shot me, of course, but I have no memory of it. I remember him shooting Vernon, and then the next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital, disoriented, more than four days later.”

“The bullet didn’t actually penetrate her head,” Micky said.

“Too hard,” Geneva declared proudly.

“Luck,” Micky clarified. “The angle of the shot was severe. The slug literally ricocheted off her skull, fracturing it, and furrowed through her scalp.”

“So, Mrs. D, how did your wires get scrambled?” Leilani asked, tapping her head.

“It was a depressed fracture,” said Geneva. “Bone chips in the brain. A blood clot.”

“They opened Aunt Gen’s head as though it were a can of beans.”

“Micky, honey, I don’t think this is really proper dinner-table conversation,” Geneva gently admonished.

“Oh, I’ve heard much worse at our house,” Leilani assured them. “Old Sinsemilla fancies herself an artist with a camera, and she has this artistic compulsion to take pictures of road kill when we’re traveling. At dinner sometimes she likes to talk about what she saw squashed on the highway that day. And my pseudofather—”

“That would be the murderer,” Micky interrupted without a wink or a smirk, as though she’d never think to question the outrageous family portrait that the girl was painting for them.

“Yeah, Dr. Doom,” Leilani confirmed.

“Never let him adopt you,” Micky said. “Even Leilani Klonk is preferable to Leilani Doom.”

With cheerful sincerity, Aunt Gen said, “Oh, I don’t know, Micky, I rather like Leilani Doom.”

As though it were the most natural thing to do, the girl picked up Micky’s fresh can of Budweiser and, instead of drinking from it, rolled it back and forth across her brow, cooling her forehead.

“Dr. Doom isn’t his real name, of course. It’s what I call him behind his back. Sometimes at dinner, he likes to talk about people he’s killed—the way they looked when they died, their last words, if they cried, whether they peed themselves, all sorts of kinky stuff.”

The girl put down the beer—on the far side of her plate, out of Micky’s reach. Her manner was casual, but her motive was nonetheless clear. She had appointed herself guardian of Micky’s sobriety.

“Maybe,” Leilani continued, “you think that would be interesting conversation, even if sort of gross, but let me tell you, it loses its charm pretty quick.”

“What’s your pseudofather’s real name?” Geneva asked.

Before Leilani could reply, Micky suggested, “Hannibal Lecter.”

“To some people, his name’s scarier than Lecter’s. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Preston Maddoc.”

“What an impressive name,” Geneva said. “Like a Supreme Court justice or a senator, or someone grand.”

Leilani said, “He comes from a family of Ivy League academic snots. Nobody in that crowd has a regular first name. They’re worse about names than old Sinsemilla. They’re all Hudson, Lombard, Trevor or Kingsley, Wycliffe, Crispin. You’d grow old and die trying to find a Jim or Bob among them. Dr. Doom’s parents were professors—history, literature—so his middle name is Claudius. Preston Claudius Maddoc.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Micky said.

Leilani appeared to be surprised. “Don’t you read newspapers?”

“I stopped reading them when they stopped carrying news,” said Geneva. “They’re all opinion now, front page to last.”

“He’s been all over television,” Leilani said.

Geneva shook her miswired head. “I don’t watch anything on TV except old movies.”

“I just don’t
like
news,” Micky explained. “It’s mostly bad, and when it isn’t bad, it’s mostly lies.”

“Ah.” Leilani’s eyes widened. “You’re the twelve percenters.”

“The what?”

“Every time the newspaper or TV people take a poll, no matter what the question, twelve percent of the public has no opinion. You could ask them if a group of mad scientists ought to be allowed to create a new species of human beings crossed with crocodiles, and twelve percent would have no opinion.”

“I’d be opposed,” said Geneva, brandishing a carrot stick.

“Me, too,” Micky agreed.

“Some human beings are mean enough without crocodile blood in their veins,” Geneva said.

“What about alligators?” Micky asked her aunt.

“Opposed,” Geneva responded with firm resolve.

“What about human beings crossed with wildly poisonous vipers?” Micky proposed.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Geneva promised.

“Okay, then what about human beings crossed with puppy dogs?”

Geneva brightened. “Now you’re talking.”

To Leilani, Micky said, “So I guess we’re not twelve percenters, after all. We have lots of opinions, and we’re proud of them.”

Grinning, Leilani bit into a crisp dill pickle. “I really like you, Micky B. You, too, Mrs. D.”

“And we like you, sweetheart,” Geneva assured her.

“Only one of you was shot in the head,” Leilani said, “but you’ve both got scrambled wiring—for the most part in a nice way.”

“You’re a master of the gracious compliment,” Micky said.

“And so smart,” Aunt Gen said proudly, as if the girl were her daughter. “Micky, did you know she’s got an IQ of one eighty-six?”

“I thought it would be at least one ninety,” Micky replied.

“The day of the test,” Leilani said, “I had chocolate ice cream for breakfast. If I’d had oatmeal, I might’ve scored six or eight points higher. Sinsemilla’s not a boffo mom when it comes to keeping the fridge stocked. So I took the test through a sugar rush and a major post-sugar crash. Not that I’m making excuses or complaining. I’m lucky there was ice cream and not just marijuana brownies. Heck, I’m lucky I’m not dead and buried in some unmarked grave, with worms making passionate worm love inside my empty skull—or taken away in an extraterrestrial starship, like Lukipela, and hauled off to some godforsaken alien planet where there’s nothing worth watching on TV and the only flavor of ice cream is chunky cockroach with crushed-glass sprinkles.”

“So now,” said Micky, “in addition to your perpetually wasted tofu-peaches-bean-sprouts mother and your murderous stepfather, we’re to believe you had a brother who was abducted by aliens.”

“That’s the current story,” Leilani said, “and we’re sticking to it. Strange lights in the sky, pale green levitation beams that suck you right out of your shoes and up into the mother ship, little gray men with big heads and enormous eyes—the whole package. Mrs. D, may I have one of those radishes that looks like a rose?”

“Of course, dear.” Geneva slid the dish of garnishes across the table.

Laughing softly, shaking her head, Micky said, “Kiddo, you’ve pushed this Addams Family routine one step too far. I don’t buy the alien abduction for a second.”

“Frankly,” Leilani said, “neither do I. But the alternative is too hideous to consider, so I just suspend my disbelief.”

“What alternative?”

“If Lukipela isn’t on an alien planet, then he’s somewhere else, and wherever that somewhere might be, you can bet it’s not warm, clean, with good potato salad and great chicken sandwiches.”

For an instant, in the girl’s lustrous blue eyes, behind the twin mirror images of the window and its burden of smoldering summer-evening light, behind the smoky reflections of the layered kitchen shadows, something seemed to turn with horrid laziness, like a body twisting slowly, slowly back and forth at the end of a hangman’s noose. Leilani looked away almost at once, and yet on the strength of a single Budweiser, Micky imagined that she had glimpsed a soul suspended over an abyss.

Chapter 6

LIKE THE SUPERNATURAL SYLPH of folklore, who inhabited the air, she approached along the hallway as though not quite touching the floor, tall and slim, wearing a platinum-gray silk suit, as graceful as a quiver of light.

Constance Veronica Tavenall-Sharmer, wife of the media-revered congressman who disbursed payoffs in airsickness bags, had been born from the headwaters of the human gene pool, before the river flowed out of Eden and became polluted with the tributaries of a fallen world. Her hair wasn’t merely blond but the rich shade of pure-gold coins, fitting for a descendant of an old-money family that earned its fortune in banking and brokerage. Matte-satin skin. Features that would, if carved in stone, earn their sculptor the highest accolades and also immortality, if you measure immortality by mere centuries and expect to find it in museums. Her willow-leaf eyes were as green as spring and as cool as the layered shade deep in a grove of trees.

When he’d met her two weeks ago, Noah Farrel had disliked this woman on first sight, strictly as a matter of principle. Born to wealth and blessed with great beauty, she would skate through life with a smile, warm in even the most bitter wind, describing graceful arabesques upon her flashing blades, while all around her people perished in the cold and fell through the ice that, though solid under her, was treacherously thin for them.

By the time Mrs. Sharmer had left his office at the end of that first meeting, Noah’s determination to dislike her had given way to admiration. She wore her beauty with humility, but more impressively, she kept her pedigree in her purse and never flashed it, as did so many others of her economic station.

At forty, she was only seven years older than Noah. Another woman this beautiful would inspire his sexual interest—even an octogenarian kept youthful by a vile diet of monkey glands. By this third meeting, however, he regarded her as he might have regarded a sister: with the desire only to protect her and earn her approval.

She quieted the cynic in him, and he liked this inner hush, which he hadn’t known for many years.

When she arrived at the open door of the presidential suite where Noah stood, she offered her hand; if younger and more foolish, he might have kissed it. Instead, they shook. Her grip was firm.

Her voice wasn’t full of money, no disdain or evidence of tutor-shaped enunciation, but rich with quiet self-possession and faraway music. “How are you this evening, Mr. Farrel?”

“Just wondering how I ever took pleasure in this line of work.”

“The cloak-and-dagger aspect ought to be fun, and the sleuthing. I’ve always loved the Rex Stout mysteries.”

“Yeah, but it never quite makes up for always being the bearer of bad news.” He stepped back from the door to let her enter.

The presidential suite was hers, not because she had booked the use of it, but because she owned the hotel. She was directly engaged in all her business enterprises; if her husband were having her followed, this early-evening visit wouldn’t raise his suspicions.

“Is bad news what you always bring?” she asked as Noah closed the door and followed her into the suite.

“Often enough that it seems like always.”

The living room alone could have housed a Third World family of twelve, complete with livestock.

“Then why not do something else?” she asked.

“They’ll never let me be a cop again, but my mind doesn’t have a reset button. If I can’t be a cop, I’ll be a make-believe cop, like what I am now, and if someday I can’t do this…Well, then…”

When he trailed off, she finished for him: “Then screw it.”

Noah smiled. This was one reason he liked her. Class and style without pretension. “Exactly.”

The suite featured contemporary decor. The honey-toned, bird’s-eye maple entertainment center, with ebony accents, was a modified obelisk, not gracefully tapered like a standard obelisk, but of chunky proportions. The open doors revealed a large TV screen.

Instead of seeking chairs, they remained standing for the show.

A single lamp glowed. Like a jury of ghosts, ranks of shadows gathered in the room.

Earlier Noah had loaded the tape in the VCR. Now he pushed
PLAY
on the remote control.

On screen: the residential street in Anaheim. The camera tilted down from a height, focusing on the house of the congressman’s lover.

“That’s a severe angle,” Mrs. Sharmer said. “Where were you?”

“I’m not shooting this. My associate is at an attic window of the place across the street. We made financial arrangements with the owner. It’s item number seven on your final bill.”

The camera pulled back and angled down even more severely to reveal Noah’s Chevrolet parked at the curb: battered but beloved steed, still ready to race when this had been shot, subsequently rendered into spare parts by a machine knacker.

“That’s my car,” he explained. “I’m behind the wheel.”

The camera tilted up, panned right: A silver Jaguar approached through the early twilight. The car stopped at the paramour’s house, a tall man got out of the passenger’s door, and the Jaguar drove away.

Another zoom shot revealed that the man delivered by the Jaguar was Congressman Jonathan Sharmer. His handsome profile was ideal for stone monuments in a heroic age, though by his actions he had proved that he possessed neither the heart nor the soul to match his face.

Arrogance issued from him as holy light might radiate from the apparition of a saint, and he stood facing the street, head raised as though he were admiring the palette of the twilight sky.

“Because he keeps tabs on you, he’s been on to me from the start, but he doesn’t know that I know that
he
knows. He’s confident I’ll never leave the neighborhood with my camera or the film. Playing with me. He isn’t aware of my associate in the attic.”

Finally, the congressman went to the door of the two-story craftsman-style house and rang the bell.

A maximum-zoom shot captured the young brunette who answered the bell. In skintight shorts and a tube top stretched so extravagantly that it might kill bystanders if it snapped, she was temptation packaged for easy access.

“Her name’s Karla Rhymes,” Noah reported. “When she worked as a dancer, she called herself Tiffany Tush.”

“Not a ballerina, I assume.”

“She performed at a club called Planet Pussycat.”

On the threshold, Karla and the politician embraced. Even in the fading light of dusk, and further obscured by the shade of the porch roof, their long kiss could not be mistaken for platonic affection.

“She’s on the payroll of your husband’s charitable foundation.”

“The Circle of Friends.”

More than friends, the couple on the TV were as close as Siamese twins, joined at the tongue.

“She gets eighty-six thousand a year,” Noah said.

The video had been silent. When the kiss ended, sound was added: Jonathan Sharmer and his charity-funded squeeze engaged in something less than sparkling romantic conversation.

“Did this Farrel asshole really show up, Jonny?”

“Don’t look directly. The old Chevy across the street.”

“The scabby little pervert can’t even afford a real car.”

“My guys will junk it. He better have a bus pass for backup.”

“I bet he’s giving himself a hand job right now, watching us.”

“I love your nasty mouth.”

Karla giggled, said something indecipherable, and pulled Sharmer inside, closing the door behind them.

Constance Tavenall—no doubt soon to cleanse herself of the name Sharmer—stared at the TV. She had married the congressman five years ago, before the first of his three successful political campaigns. By creating the Circle of Friends, he wove an image as a compassionate thinker with innovative approaches to social problems, while marriage to this woman lent him class, respectability. For a husband utterly lacking in character, such a spouse was the moral equivalent of arm candy, meant to dazzle the cognoscenti, not with her beauty, but with her sterling reputation, making it less likely that Sharmer would be the object of suspicion or the subject of close scrutiny.

Considering that all this had just now become incontestably clear to Constance, her composure was remarkable. The crudeness of what she heard failed to fire a blush in her. If she harbored anger, she hid it well. Instead, a barely perceptible yet awful sadness manifested as a faint glister in her eyes.

“A highly efficient directional microphone was synchronized with the camera,” Noah explained. “We’ve added a soundtrack only where we’ve got conversation that’ll ruin him.”

“A stripper. Such a cliche.” Even in the thread of quiet sorrow that this tape spun around her, she found a thin filament of humor, the irony that is the mother-of-all in human relationships. “Jonathan cultivates an image of hip sophistication. The press see themselves in him. They’d forgive him anything, even murder, but they’ll turn savage now because the cliche of this will embarrass them.”

The tape went silent again as a perfectly executed time dissolve brought the viewer from twilight to full night on the same street.

“We’re using a camera and special film with exceptional ability to record clear images in a minimum of light.”

Noah half expected to hear ominous music building toward the assault on the Chevy. Once in a while, Bobby Zoon couldn’t resist indulging in the techniques that he was learning in film school.

The first time that he’d worked for Noah, the kid had delivered a handsomely shot and effectively edited ten-minute piece showing a software designer trading diskettes containing his employer’s most precious product secrets in return for a suitcase full of cash. The tape began with a title card that announced
A Film by Robert Zoon,
and Bobby was crushed when Noah insisted that he remove his credit.

In the Sharmer case, Bobby didn’t catch the jolly approach of the Beagle Boys with their sledgehammer and tire iron. He focused on Karla’s house, on the lighted window of an upstairs bedroom, where the gap between the half-closed drapes tantalized with the prospect of an image suitable for the front page of the sleaziest tabloid.

Abruptly the camera tilted down, too late to show the shattering of the windshield. Documented, however, were the bashing of the side window, Noah’s eruption from the Chevy, and the gleeful capering of the two brightly costumed behemoths who obviously had learned all the wrong lessons from the morning cartoon programs that had been the sole source of moral education during their formative years.

“No doubt,” Noah said, “they were once troubled youths rescued from a life of mischief, and rehabilitated by the Circle of Friends. I expected to be spotted and warned off, but I thought the approach, however it came, would be a lot more discreet than this.”

“Jonathan likes walking the edge. Risk excites him.”

As proof of what Constance Tavenall had just said, the videotape cut from the Chevy to the soft light at the bedroom window across the street. The drapes had been pulled aside. Karla Rhymes stood at the pane, as though showcased: visible above the waist, nude. Jonathan Sharmer, also nude, loomed behind her, hands on her bare shoulders.

Sound returned to the tape. Over a background crash-and-clatter of Chevy-bashing, the directional microphone captured the laughter and most of the running commentary between Karla and the congressman as they enjoyed the spectacle in the street below.

The violence aroused them. Jonathan’s hands slid from Karla’s shoulders to her breasts. Soon he was joined with her, from behind.

Earlier, the congressman had admired Karla’s “nasty mouth.” Now he proved that he himself could not have had a dirtier mouth if he’d spent the past few years licking the streets of Washington, D.C. He called the woman obscene names, heaped verbal abuse on her, and she seemed to thrill to every vicious and demeaning thing he said.

Noah pressed
STOP
on the remote control. “There’s only more of the same.” He took the videotape from the VCR and put it in a Neiman Marcus shopping bag that he’d brought. “I’ve given you two more copies, plus cassettes of all the raw footage before we edited it.”

“What a perfectly appropriate word—
raw.
”

“I’ve kept copies in case anything happens to yours.”

“I’m not afraid of him.”

“I never imagined you were. More news—Karla’s house was bought with Circle of Friends money. Half a million disguised as a research grant. Her own nonprofit corporation holds title to the property.”

“They’re all such selfless do-gooders.” Constance Tavenall’s voice was crisp with sarcasm but remarkably free of bitterness.

“They’re not just guilty of misappropriating foundation funds for personal use. Circle of Friends receives millions in government grants, so they’re in violation of numerous other federal statutes.”

“You have the corroborating evidence?”

He nodded. “It’s all in the Neiman Marcus bag.” He hesitated, but then decided that this woman’s exceptional strength matched the congressman’s weakness. She didn’t have to be coddled. “Karla Rhymes isn’t his only mistress. There’s one in New York, one in Washington. Circle of Friends indirectly purchased their residences, too.”

“That’s in the bag? Then you’ve completely destroyed him, Mr. Farrel.”

“My pleasure.”

“He underestimated you. And I regret to admit, when I came to you, my expectations weren’t terribly high, either.”

In their initial meeting, she acknowledged that she would have preferred a large detective agency or a private security firm with nationwide reach. She suspected, however, that all those operations did business, from time to time, with individual politicians and with the major political parties. She was concerned that the one she chose would have an existing relationship with her husband or with a friend of his in Congress, and that they might see more long-term profit in betraying her than in serving her honestly and well.

“No offense taken,” Noah said. “No sane person ought to have confidence in a guy whose business address is also his apartment—and the whole shebang in three rooms above a palm-reader’s office.”