The Last Family (34 page)

“Jesus,” Thorne said. “That’s one very amazing picture. Sure ain’t Disney.” Laura looked amused. “What does it mean?”

“Nothing much,” she said absently. “Well, maybe that shepherd who bears some resemblance to Reid is protecting his sheep from wolves. It isn’t so very deep.”

“You got the idea from literature?”

“I got the idea from the way he was standing when he exited the shower one day and struck that pose. I thought … Am I embarrassing you, Thorne?—I’m divorced four years now.”

“Oh, no—hellfire, Laura. I live in L.A. It’s just the shock is all … I mean, seeing the man naked like that.”

“That’s strange. Naked, you say? Yes, must be some sort of coincidence. Maybe it’s because he was naked while he posed.” She laughed, and it was a full, relaxed sound.

“I didn’t mean … Laura, I’m no judge of art, but—you got your kids here.”

“Reb and Erin have both known the details of the human anatomy for several years.” She fought the urge to laugh out loud.

“What would you do if Paul saw it?”

“Thorne! Paul and I haven’t spoken in years. What makes you think he cares if I paint nudes?”

“He cares.”

“About what?”

“About you, the children.”

“How can you tell? Because I sure can’t.”

“I can just tell, that’s all. You don’t know what it took to get him out of that place. He almost had a nervous breakdown at the idea of leaving. Until we told him you and the kids were in danger, he wouldn’t hear of it. Take my word.”

Laura studied Thorne for a few long seconds. “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you? You believe it, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“How does he look, Thorne? How does he seem now?”

Reid entered with a tray of coffee and set it on the table.

“Thorne, coffee?” he asked.

“No. We were discussing the painting.”

“They don’t have male nudes in Los Angeles, it seems,” Laura said, laughing.

“Sure they do, we have lots. No place more loose than Hollyweird. But, Reid, doesn’t it make you nervous to have this up on a wall? I mean, in all your natural splendor, and all for the world to see? I mean, you’re no mystery anymore.”

“No. But I have to admit that the thought of this hanging”—he realized he was pointing at the genitals and smiled at Thorne—“this painting hanging in some Bavarian industrialist’s great room and being stared at by strangers for the next three or four centuries is hard to handle. Maybe being the twisted fantasy of some young lassie not yet born. I’ll be some dead and dusty memory, but this thing will be exactly as it is now. That’s the strangest part to me. For the time that canvas lasts, I will always be thirty-something.”

“Just like Jack Benny,” Laura said.

“What do you think of the others?” Reid asked.

“I hope you won’t take this question wrong, Laura, but what do you get for a painting like this?” He pointed at the picture of Reb in a toga with Wolf, standing on the steps of a ruined temple. Wolf was staring at the viewer, and there was a dead asp, belly up, under the dog’s paws—blood-red where the serpent’s flesh had been shredded by the dog. Reb’s skin was translucent, like that of the lambs in the painting of Reid, the blue veins showing. The dog’s eyes were crystalline blue, interchangeable replicas of his master’s.

“I’m not sure,” Laura said. “They’re asking one hundred twenty-five for this series of three.”

“That seems really cheap,” Thorne said. “Maybe I can buy one of my dog, Sambo? Not this big, though. I wouldn’t have a place to put it in my apartment. Maybe horizontal instead of vertical, and love-seat size instead of sofa. Is that about the same money, huh?”

“Or you could take a photograph of the dog and use the difference you’d save to buy a new Rolls convertible,” Reid said.

Thorne’s mouth opened, and he stared dumbfounded for a split second. Then he laughed. “You mean a hundred twenty-five thousand?”

Laura smiled. “I know it’s obscene, considering the people you could feed with that.”

“Jesus,” Thorne said. There was a new respect in his eyes. “Could you teach me how to do that?” The light mood was broken by the sight of the two agents carrying boxes down the hall toward the stairs.

“I’ll show them where to put that,” Laura said, leaving the ballroom.

“She’s very talented,” Reid said. “They’ll bring ten times that someday.”

“A million dollars! Jeez.”

“It isn’t out of the question.”

“Well, it’s out of my question and answer.” Thorne turned to look at Reid. “I keep thinking that we’ve met before.”

“You’ve met all of me,” Reid said, indicating the painting.

37

M
ARTIN HAD ALWAYS LOVED SPYING BECAUSE IT WAS THE SECRET
sharing of information—information he wasn’t supposed to have. And the more craftily it was taken, the less evidence there was of his having taken it. He found himself out in the open sunshine on St. Charles Avenue a mile from Laura’s house collecting information. If those DEA fools knew what he looked like, he’d be dead. Martin Fletcher shifted in the driver’s seat of his old Chevrolet so he could see down St. Charles Avenue and checked his watch. It was two
P.M.
Erin’s streetcar would be arriving to pick her up any minute. It had been a long time since he had watched her, but today was important. Thorne and the agents had moved across the street and into Laura’s house. There were agents on the perimeter, and police patrols had been tripled within ten blocks of the house. He had decided that he couldn’t afford to drive by the house anymore until it was time to move in
for keeps. He had a plan in case they stayed ensconced inside.

He was hoping they would move the family before his mother took the agents off on the annual parade. He knew that if he was in Paul’s shoes that’s what he would do. They assumed they could follow her to him. But they couldn’t move the family too far, or to a place that was too well protected, because they wouldn’t risk putting them completely out of reach of an attempt. They also couldn’t risk losing a shot at him. No, that meant too much to all the people involved. Not even Paul could order them whisked out of sight completely. He knew what was in Paul’s mind: that if they missed him with his mother, they thought they could get him when he came for the family. They would assume they had two opportunities at him. But he knew something they didn’t know—that there was no way they could possibly succeed. He was on St. Charles Avenue to see how good the new stage of coverage was. So far it looked totally amateurish. Either they weren’t taking him seriously, or they were completely incompetent. It didn’t matter which.

Martin had not been at all upset that the agents had found his bug. He had anticipated it. He had figured correctly that they would then bug the house themselves, and when they had, it had just become a matter of frequency searching until he was able to apprehend the signals being sent to the DEA’s receiver. The laser device didn’t bother him; he’d figured that was the technology they’d use. He listened carefully to the morning’s broadcast, which he picked up from a remote receiver carefully hidden three blocks from Laura’s house in a boarded-up Sunoco station.

“She’s very talented,”
Reid was saying.
“They’ll bring ten times that someday.”

“A million dollars?”

“A million bucks, aw shucks.” Martin mimicked Thorne’s voice. “Ow fuck me runnin’.”

“It isn’t out of the question,”
Reid’s voice answered.

“Once the bitch is dead,” Martin added, “sky’s the limit. Maybe three million.”

“Well, it’s out of my range,”
Thorne said.

“So’s Lassie’s IQ.” Martin giggled.

“I keep thinking that we’ve met before,”
Thorne said.

“You’ve met all of me,”
Reid said.

“Not yet,” Martin said.

Martin snapped off the tape and removed the earphones. He was watching the streetcar stop. He knew Erin’s schedule as well as he knew Reb’s. One day a few weeks earlier he had taken a seat on the streetcar beside Erin. He had been disguised that day as an older man and had spoken to her, turning his most disarming personality into several blocks’ worth of small talk. He could have killed her but let the opportunity pass. The time just hadn’t been right.

He watched as a woman in her late thirties passed, pulling a six- or seven-year-old boy along toward the corner. It triggered a flow of memories, and he closed his eyes and rubbed the sockets gently. He had liked to watch his parents—to spy on their secret world, starting at age four or so. He had especially loved it when they were arguing, because when they argued, they made up with an emotionally charged fuck that made the springs echo through the house, and they snorted and yelled things that were funny.

Martin remembered everything. He had been small, seven or eight, and his ears half again as large as his head as he moved down the narrow hallway toward his parents’ bedroom that night. Martin had stood in the dark hall and peered into the well-lit room from the vertical opening between the jamb and the door’s edge. The door would not close all the way because it was warped, and if he stayed well back in the darkness, he could watch their secret lives.

That evening promised a good making-up session because his father had himself worked up into a rage and he was screaming at his mother, who was sitting on the bed looking into her lap, where she had locked her fingers around some knitting. “We can’t afford it!” he shouted, his face looking like a hot-water bottle filled with all but enough pressure to explode.

“He wanted it,” she replied. “And we can afford it,” she added calmly. “You’re his father, and all the other kids have bicycles and far, far more than he has.” She wagged the needle in his direction, and this further enraged him.

“He’s a fuckin’ pansy. He’ll get hurt on it, and doctors cost money. More’n we got, the way we’re goin’.”

“You’re a skinflint. Marty’s a good boy. And he’s your only son.”

“Son of mine? That punk’ll be trading blow jobs for baseball cards in a few years. And he’s no son of mine. You fooled me, you slutty bitch. His father was more’n likely some clap-drippin’, liver-lip, monkey-dicked nigger from—”

“Don’t you dare speak about him like that!”

“He’s a pencil-dicked fairy, and you’re a dried-up sack of corn husks. You haven’t felt a human emotion since the first time you felt hunger and wanted to suck your mother’s tit.”

“I’m warning you,” she said flatly. “I won’t let this pass if you say any more. That’s all, and you know I’m good as my word.” She might have been reading instructions off the back of a cake-mix box. “Don’t talk about my Martin.”

“Or you’ll what?” He raised his fist over her head. “You cock-suckin’—”

“I’ll kill you.”

He dropped his hands and bent down closer to her face. “He’s a little bed-wetting, turd-eating, cock-suckin’ …”

From the hallway the motion Martin caught from his perspective was more like a sneeze than a thrust. Eve jerked her head down and then pushed up with both hands, and then she was standing with a knitting needle in her hand, the tip buried deep in his father’s eye socket. Milton Fletcher’s body lurched as if he had been electrocuted. He collapsed in a heap.

“Oh, dear, now look,” she said. She reached down and tugged at the needle. Then she put her foot on his forehead and pulled hard, and there was a noise like a
cork popping and she had pulled the needle out. She wiped it carefully on his pant leg before she put it into the basket on the bed.

“I told you,” she announced. She pointed her finger at the body and wagged it up and down. “I warned you, mister. Don’t say I didn’t.”

Eve turned and saw her son standing in the shaft of light with his hands covering his mouth.

“Come right in here.” She pointed at her feet as if she was commanding a dog. He entered the room, his eyes wide in terror.

“Baby, it’s okay. Daddy had a seizure is all.”

The child looked down at the open eye, which had filled with blood.

“I saw …,” he said. “You stuck his eye with that. How’d you do it?”

“Were you spying on your mother?”

“No. I was just—”

“Spying. Well, when you spy, you never know what you’ll see.” She laughed and patted his head. “Did you hear me warn him?”

“Yes.”

“See, you have to listen to Mother. It isn’t who you know or what you know, baby. It’s what you know about who that matters.”

“Is he dead?” Martin had gone down on his knees like a prisoner awaiting interrogation and prodded his father’s cheek with his finger. It came away red, and he inspected it carefully before he wiped it on his pants.

“Deader’n Kelsey’s nuts,” Eve said. “Help me. Lift up his feet and I’ll pull ’em. Else he might snag something. Wait a minute, let me get a towel before he bleeds all over the floor. Nothin’ harder to clear up as that.”

Young Martin had followed his mother, who pulled his father through the house by his thick wrists. Martin had struggled to hold up the feet, using the cuffs of the pants as handles. He looked at the towel that she had wrapped around the head and noticed the spot growing as they went. They went through the kitchen and down
the stairs and stopped in the yard, where she leaned him up against a tree.

“Are you cold, baby?” she asked.

The child shook his head. His feet were wet, and it was cool.

“Wait here,” she said, and ran back into the house.

Somewhere a dog barked a promise. Martin remembered that. Three times. Then tires had squealed out in front of the house as a drunk in a large loud car stopped, one car door opened and slammed, and a shrieking woman opened up. “Youthinkyou’resoooo—hot! You sack … of … shirt.”

The driver yelled something unintelligible that was muffled by the trees, and the tires squealed as the car turned the corner. Seconds later a house door slammed, rattling the glass.

His mother came out their back door and strode up holding a shotgun—naked except for her shower cap and reading glasses. She jerked the towel free from Milton’s head and pushed the gun barrel hard against the pierced eye, resting the butt on the ground between his splayed legs. His father’s hand made a fist in the grass beside his leg, and he made a noise that sounded like a fish being stepped on.