Relentless (30 page)

“The school of common sense. If you could turn the toasting of a slice of bread into a calamity, no one would ever want you to pick up a gun.”

“Calamity is a pretty strong word.”

“Kitchen-repair bill was three thousand bucks. And you are
not
a clumsy man. Consider your writing. Consider how you are in bed.”

“I’m no Jon Bon Jovi.”

“I’m no longer a schoolgirl with expectations as low as that. You learned the basics of guns today, and the world didn’t end.”

“The day’s not over.”

She kissed me. Her tongue was sweet.

“Aunt Edith was right about one thing,” I said. “I sure do know how to pick ’em.”

Watching from the Mountaineer, Lassie had laughed at me so much that she needed to pee.

Thereafter, Penny drove us off the shingle, to the dirt road, and back toward Highway 101.

“How did the gun thing go?” Milo asked.

“Your mother’s still alive,” I said.

“What about your feet?”

“I didn’t shoot either of them.”

“Triumph.”

My disposable cell phone rang, and it was Vivian Norby She had gotten a disposable of her own, and she gave me the number.

“How’s it going?” Vivian asked.

“We haven’t driven your Mountaineer off a cliff.”

“You mean you’ve made Penny do all that driving herself?”

“I’m not going to let you sit Milo anymore. Obviously, he’s a bad influence.”

“Listen,” Vivian said, “I’ve been on the Net doing research, and I’ve got some interesting news. I don’t think Thomas Landulf was Waxx’s only victim in Smokeville. There’s maybe another one, his name is Henry Casas, and he’s sort of alive.”

   Smokeville was so picturesque that you kept looking for the gnomes and elfenfolk who constructed it.

The buildings on the main street and most of the houses were Victorian, with enough gingerbread to make any Modern Movement architect grind his teeth to dust.

This settlement of four thousand lay on lowlands just above the sea. Its western neighborhoods sloped down through cedars and hemlocks to the shore.

In the sea were magnificent rock towers, weathered into fanciful shapes, from which the wind, when at sufficient force, raised the voices of mournful oboes, of soft uilleann pipes and penny whistles yearning for Ireland.

Warburton Motor Court was a collection of quaint little cottages from the 1930s, shaded by the robes of immense deodar cedars like giant monks gathered for worship.

Cash in advance and the license-plate number of the Mountaineer
bought us enough trust from the desk clerk that I was not asked to provide a credit card or a driver’s license. I signed the register as Kenton Ewen, borrowing two of my lost uncles’ first names.

Milo abandoned one trunk when we fled the peninsula house, but he had the bread-box thing he saved from that debacle, the items that Grimbald obtained, and a second trunk of oddities, curiosities, and incomprehensibles. He was eager to set up shop in the cramped living room of the cottage.

According to the address Vivian Norby obtained, Henry Casas lived within easy walking distance of Warburton Motor Court. Given his circumstances, we felt that I would have the best chance of seeing him if I went alone.

Penny and I were loath to split up, but we were now armed and less vulnerable than before. She remained with Milo and Lassie in the motor-court cottage.

Henry Casas’s house was a splendid Victorian with a deep front porch and an Italianate double door with a stained-glass fanlight.

Two and a half years ago, Henry’s mother moved to Smokeville from Atlanta, to run his house and to oversee his care.

The woman who answered the doorbell appeared to be in her mid-fifties. Her flawless skin, doe eyes, and petite frame suggested a delicate flower, but her hands were strong and marked by work, and there was about her an air of one who never shrank from a challenge.

“Good afternoon.” She had a southern accent.

“Are you Mrs. Casas?”

“Henry’s mother, yes.”

“Mrs. Casas, my name is—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Greenwich. I can’t for the life of me imagine why you’re here, but it’s a pleasure to welcome you.”

She stepped back from the threshold and ushered me inside.

Although she assumed that I hoped to see her son, she took me first to the library, which had many books and no DVDs.

The most striking things in the room were two paintings by Henry. His talent was immense.

A narrative artist of real genius, his technique was meticulous. One work was egg tempera on a gesso foundation, the other a dry-brush watercolor. His sense of light, the clarity of his execution riveted the eye. Clearly, he was influenced by Andrew Wyeth, but his subjects were his own, as was the complexity of his intent.

Turning from the second painting, I went directly to the heart of the matter: “Mrs. Casas, was your son a friend of Thomas Landulf?”

She met my eyes no less directly than did Penny, and I saw that she had already decided to trust me. “Yes. They were good friends.”

“Does Henry believe that Tom Landulf killed his wife and child, then set himself afire?”

“No, Mr. Greenwich, he does not.”

“Please call me Cubby.”

“Thank you, Cubby. I’m Arabella. Bella to friends.”

“Does Henry wonder if his assailants may have been the same people who murdered the Landulfs?”

“He is certain of it. But the police consider the Landulf matter settled. And they have made no progress on Henry’s case.”

“Bella, the people who killed the Landulfs and brutalized your son—they’re now trying to kill my family, and me.”

“Then God help you, Cubby. And I’m sure Henry will want to help as well. I assume you want to see him.”

“If it’s not too great an imposition.”

“Are you prepared for him? Do you know what was done to him?”

“Yes. But I would guess hearing about it isn’t the same as seeing him firsthand.”

“Not the same at all,” she agreed. “The thing to remember is, he does not want pity or even sympathy. Especially not from someone he admires, like you.”

I nodded. “I won’t offend him.”

“You may have heard a police theory that Henry solicited men in a gay bar and went somewhere with them, not realizing he had fallen into the hands of psychopaths.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“Well, it isn’t true. Henry is not gay, and neither were those who mutilated him. He was awakened in this house, taken from it in the middle of the night—and brought back two months later. Please wait here while I let him know you’ve come to visit.”

Alone for the next ten minutes, I gave my mind and heart to the appreciation of the two paintings.

Henry Casas would do no more of his great work. At the age of thirty-six, he was blinded by the measured application of an acid. His hands were amputated at the wrists with surgical precision.

Perhaps because he had been known to speak so articulately about painting and culture, in resistance to certain ideological art, his tongue and his vocal cords were removed.

Now he lived without sight, without a sense of taste, without an easy means of communication, with no outlet for his talent, still this side of death but perhaps, on his worst days, wondering if he should take the final steps.

   A former first-floor drawing room had been converted into a combination bedroom, sitting room, and studio, with a wooden floor and no carpet.

Easels and art supplies suggested that somehow Henry still worked, though no paintings were in view.

Barefoot, in jeans and a flannel shirt, he sat in a wheeled office chair, at a computer, from which he turned toward us as we approached.

His glass eyes—actually plastic hemispheres—were attached to his ocular muscles and moved like real eyes, though he was blind.

He remained a handsome man, and nothing in his expression or his attitude suggested he felt defeated.

Mechanical hands, not prostheses meant to look like real hands but three-digit robotic devices, had been attached to the stumps of his wrists and evidently were operated by nerve impulses.

When I told him what a pleasure it was to meet him and spoke of
my admiration for the paintings in the library, in such terms that I hoped he would know I was sincere, he listened with a smile.

In reply, he turned to the computer keyboard, and with one of his steel fingers, he began to type.

I could hardly imagine the laborious effort he had expended teaching himself to find the right keys without the assistance of eyes and with fingers that could not feel what they touched.

When he finished, I assumed I should step closer to read the words on the screen, but before I could move, he pressed a final key, and a synthesized computer voice spoke what he had written:
“I’m a crazed fan. Halfway through your new book. Splendid.”

Bella indicated a portable CD player and an audio edition of
One O’Clock Jump
on a table beside the sofa.

His mother had explained why I had come. He was willing to answer my questions, was in fact eager to help.

I told him about Shearman Waxx, a condensed version of what we had already endured at the critic’s hands.

On the phone earlier, Vivian Norby had called Waxx not merely an enigma but more precisely a black hole. After hours of work on the Internet, she had been able to learn nothing more about him than we already knew.

Who were his parents? Where was he born? Where did he go to school? What jobs did he have before his first book on creative writing was adopted in so many universities and he was hired as a reviewer? Even questions of that fundamental nature could not be answered.

In frustration, wondering if Waxx might have written anything under a pseudonym, Vivian made search strings out of some Waxx-isms, favorite and unique expressions that were repeated in his reviews—and she was led to an art critic named Russell Bertrand, who was published regularly in the foremost art journal in the country.

Russell Bertrand excoriated some painters and sculptors as viciously
as Waxx went after some writers. Not only were Waxx-isms embedded in Bertrand’s reviews, but his prose also proved to be burdened by Waxx’s signature syntax.

When Vivian sought Bertrand’s biography, she found that it was more spare than Waxx’s bio, without even a home location to be found on Google Earth. Another black hole. Or the same one.

Next, Vivian searched Bertrand’s review archives, looking for artists he savaged with particular enthusiasm, one of whom was Henry Casas in Smokeville, California.

Henry and Bella were encouraged by the headway we had made in our investigation, but I warned them to keep their expectations realistic. We were a long way from having any evidence that Waxx—alias Russell Bertrand—had committed crimes.

My hope that Henry might be able to describe his kidnapper was not fulfilled. He had been sedated through most of the period when he had been in captivity.

Speaking through his computer, he said one thing that rattled me:
“Not just one of them. During two months, I heard eight … ten voices. Maybe more.”

If his perceptions during captivity were not so drug-addled that they should be dismissed, then we had gone from a lone psycho to a pair of them—and now to an entire
organization
, which defied belief.