The Horses of the Night (27 page)

Her eyes were wide. She was smiling, moving the glass from one place to another across the surface of the desk. “I tried to warn you, Stratton,” she said. “Didn't I?”

“That's why I came here. I'm not afraid.”

Her voice was husky. “But you should be.”

Alive, make me alive
.

“My mother used to love roses,” I said.

When a door opened, the stealth of the step, and the location of the door, surprised me. I did not expect an entrance from the side, and I did not expect such a swift response to my presence. I had been willing to wait.

I did not turn to look. I had never had such good hearing. I could smell the new presence in the room, a mid-grade aftershave, and a sense of human bulk. The silence in the room changed. Whoever he was, he was big.

Anna did not want to witness this. I read her eyes. She was one of those people who like to be insulated from violence. If harm was done, she did not want to see it. Her eyes told me that I had a few seconds to get out of the chair. I felt compassion for Anna. She did not, when it came down to it, want to see me killed.

He can't hurt me
.

It was almost amusing to see her features stiffen, her smile go hard, her eyes telling me that it was too late.

41

Why does the rose, that slender stem, have thorns? For protection, of course, but why don't the honeysuckle vine or the climbing wisteria have thorns? Some careful absence of good fortune pruned the rose into its meanness. Evolution is accident. It consists of what does not happen as well as what does. It consists of absence, a lack of water, of light, or the purest absence, the lack of creatures who can digest the thorns and must select instead the new shoots of timothy.

I watched Anna Wick's eyes, and they told me all I needed to know.

I spun out of the chair and lifted one hand. I was slammed back into the chair, writhing, my arm paralyzed. I kicked hard against the desk, and forced the chair backwards.

My chair fell to one side, and someone fell with me. I struggled on the floor, unable to do anything but wrestle in one place with a wire held, garrot-fashion, around my neck, my arm, and part of the headrest of the chair.

I was pinned. But there was a moment of stillness inside me. The loop of wire was in no position to do me much harm. There was a lucid interval in which I realized that I was trapped, but not in immediate danger of dying. And there was another, starker understanding. In a moment my attacker would release me just long enough to get a new grip on his piano wire, and then he would try again.

And next time the wire would not miss.

I jammed the chair backward, pushing with my feet, and we scuttled back, a monster made of two men and an executive chair. The force of my kick slackened the wire just enough.

I wrenched my shoulders and was on my feet.

He was a large man, with gray hair on his head and tufts of it in his nostrils. He did not hesitate. My escape was of little interest to him. His expression was determined, but not malicious. It was the intensity of a plumber, the frown of a carpenter fumbling for his hammer.

The loop was around my neck again. His fists met, but before he cut into my neck I kneed him in the crotch, hard.

He did not go down, but I confused the effort, the wire losing its bite. I forced his head back, kicking, kneeing, all the while forcing him against the wall where I began, methodically, pounding his head against the plasterboard.

A large chunk of the wall caved in. We were showered with white dust. Big slabs of wallboard attached themselves to our elbows and shoulders. We worked ourselves out of the fragments of wall, and he was stronger than ever, gouging at my eyes with his thumbs.

My vision squirmed, lightning and galaxy-scarlet in my sight as he stabbed at my eyesockets. I seized a thumb between my teeth, and bit as hard as I could, down into the bone. I shoved his head back against one of the steel wall studs.

I began pounding again, and this time the wall did not give way. The beam was blue-black, still decorated with the yellow crayon of the construction foreman years ago. Blood flowed from his thumb into my mouth, the thumbnail on my tongue like a thorn. His free arm tried to loop the wire around the back of my skull, fighting for a place around me, but I slammed the gray-haired head into the steel beam until the arm began to weaken.

For years I had stepped into the streetlight to avoid the passing car, eyed my mail for a letter bomb, a ransom demand, a scissor-and-paste missive of hatred.

Those days were done. When the head became sloppy, I spat out the thumb, releasing the arm streaming with blood. I kicked the body as it hunched, trying to cover itself up. One hand still fished toward me with the wire. There were grips of black electrician's tape, wound around and around to make handholds. A knob of black tape struggled toward me, the wire having a vitality of its own, like a plumber's snake, a fight quite independent from the fist that held it.

I snatched the wire, and pulled hard.

The length of wire in my hand, I stepped before the white-powdered, bloody mess before me. I whipped the wire around the neck, and cut into it, using all my strength.

Anna had shrunk against a far wall. Her hand, with plum-dark fingernails, was to her face.

What was I doing?

What am I doing with this wire?

I dropped it. I fought free of the body and stumbled away from it.

The man made a retching sound, rising to his knees. His hands were at his head. He tried to get up and could not, falling back against the wall, his weight caving in another section of plasterboard.

I was not a human being.

42

I put my hand on the telephone, and Anna said, “Don't!”

I looked at her, mystified.

“I'll take care of everything,” she said.

I thought for a moment that she must mean that she could call an in-house physician, or bring some sort of miracle to pass.

I called 911.

It wasn't that easy. I was trembling, and the numbers on the buttons did not look like numbers to me, but something unrecognizable.

I told them that I was Stratton Fields. I said that I thought I had killed a man at the DeVere offices on Montgomery Street.

I could not bring myself to look at the body.

Anna handed me a drink. I tasted it and then left it on the desk.

“You know what you're doing,” she said in a tone of quiet amazement.

The roses were still there, upright in the vase. There was the softest velvet sheen on the petals.

I could not speak to her.

“We're going to make a good team,” she said.

She showed me to a washroom, a large room with a bathtub and a sheaf of dried rushes in the corner. The soap was unscented coconut oil with DeVere's signature imprinted in it.

My eyes in the mirror showed no feeling. I had enjoyed the fight. That is what disturbed me. I had planned it, anticipated it with pleasure, and when I saw my attacker's blood I had relished the sight.

When I stepped from the washroom there were police, there was the damaged wall, and blood, but there was no sign of my gray-haired opponent. Anna was deep into an explanation. Strong words. Lost tempers. No real harm.

The police officers greeted me respectfully. “Do you subscribe to this description of the events?” one of them asked, a young one, fresh from textbooks and the firing range.

I told them what had happened.

“Self-defense,” said the older one.

“Do you know the name of the assailant?” asked the other. I had the impression that they were interested in arresting him, and were on the verge of congratulating me.

I was trying to make a confession. Their attitude told me that they would not mind if I beat one of DeVere's myrmidons to a boneless pulp. I knew how things stood: public opinion did not favor the DeVere empire. DeVere had tried to manipulate the award. The distinguished Fields family deserved satisfaction. The police were concerned for my health, wanted to know if I thought I would need medical attention. Someone from the department would contact me when it was convenient to take a statement.

Then they left with Anna to look for what they had begun calling “the suspect,” leaving me feeling that I would be able to do anything I wanted—anything at all—and get away with it.

“If there was a body, Anna Wick took care of it,” said Childress.

I had wanted this conversation far from any of Renman's people, far from any possible listening devices, and far away from my own house, with its Milton on the shelf to remind me of what I had done.

I had been a little surprised that Childress had been so eager to meet me away from tape recorders and underlings. I understood, however, when he said, “It doesn't matter if you killed him, or who he was. No one would blame you.”

My tone was one of disbelief. “It doesn't matter!”

“Do you want it to matter?”

We walked through the shadows of Golden Gate Park. A photographer walked backward ahead of us, squeezing off shots of the two of us. I had become a walking photo-op, and Childress was rumored to be close to announcing his candidacy for supervisor. We were trailed by a couple of plainclothes police, men chewing gum and watching everything that happened around them in a way that reminded me of Fern.

“I thought it was a sin to kill someone,” I said.

We kept our voices low, our expressions the sort of public unconcern that appears so often in newspapers and news videos of politicians and celebrities.

“I don't know about sin,” he said. “You realize what people are saying about you.”

“Enlighten me.”

“They say some people should be excused if they decide to cut their way through life. Used to be they said it about DeVere. Now they say it about you. DeVere was hungry. He made deals wherever he could. If he wanted a better price on Egyptian cotton, he dealt with importers who weren't, maybe, totally legit. He helped a friend, he got helped.”

Childress considered for a moment, and then continued, “And with Dr. Lyle in what the papers are calling a ‘vegetative state,' nobody would blame you if you decided to strangle someone. You have public opinion in the palm of your hand.”

I thought for a moment. “I've expected DeVere's old associates to see me as an irritation.”

He laughed, a sound like a grunt. “They hate guys like you.”

“What do
you
think?”

He took his time answering. “One or two people in the police department have the same idea. Maybe you killed Blake. Maybe you killed DeVere.”

“You're keeping something back.”

He smiled without mirth and shook his head. “I hate being a cop.”

I said nothing.

“Some people,” Childress continued, “say they saw someone vaguely answering your description in DeVere headquarters the evening he died. The witnesses are not definite, but the question has come up hard. Maybe you did it.”

The sugar-frosting conservatory, the Hall of Flowers, gleamed before us. The splendid construction was modeled after the glass-and-metal flower sanctuary built by Prince Albert for the London Exhibition.

I motioned Childress into the conservatory. It worked—the camera did not follow, and the two dark-suited cops stayed outside. The hothouse was too overgrown, and did not offer the opportunities for pleasing camera angles, and many policemen are suspicious of closed spaces.

“If you did something. If a man did something. And came to regret it.” Childress thought for awhile. “He could use some help.”

The air was a paste, heavy on the tongue. Childress was a little less happy than I was to be in this elaborate hothouse. He surveyed his surroundings without love. “No one,” he said, “wants to see Stratton Fields go to prison.”

The windows were washed with white, and sunlight radiated through the white transformed from the light of a star to something subsumed and traduced by plantlife. It was nearly hot in the conservatory. The smell was rich: mulch, wet concrete, and the nonodor that was the exuded carbon dioxide of so many broad-leaved plants.

“It's all so easy,” I said.

“Detectives have been asking questions,” he said. “Legitimate private investigators, the kind that handle Beverly Hills divorces. The feeling is that we won't prosecute because you're an old San Francisco name. The fact is, we don't have a case. Yet.”

I spoke again, knowing that I had heard enough. “What can you do about it?”

“Not much. Tell you to take care of yourself.”

“Do I look worried?”

“That beating that killed Fern, and …” Childress had the good sense not to mention Nona. “We don't know who they were, but there are more like them. People admire you. Maybe that bothers people like Renman.”

“I'm an innocent man.”

“Are you,” he said. He said it flatly, without any intonation except one that meant he did not believe me. “Innocent, guilty.” He sighed, as though to say: What difference does it make?

The atmosphere in the conservatory always made me feel enlivened and stifled at the same time, the humidity and the wealth of life combining to make a place that is a part of no other world. Perhaps it was this building alone that inspired my career. Make a new world, I had told myself as a much younger man, a new world more like the world than the earth itself.

“What's going to happen next?” I asked.

He answered easily. “Another attempt on your life.”

I turned to look at him.

Some plants remind me of people. They live in soil so leached of hope that they have to steal nourishment. We stood before a pitcher plant, a jungle survivor that drowns insects and absorbs their proteins.

“What would be the fun,” he said, “if we knew when?”

I laughed, and for a few moments Childress and I understood each other, liked each other again, and did not want this conversation to end.

“You want to quit being a cop,” I said at last. “You want to be somebody.”