Waxman made his way along the wall to the phone. He lifted the receiver and dialed 911. As he waited for the operator his eyes rose to the message left in red on the walclass="underline" FRANCISCO. THE LADY WAITS. COME SEE.
The operator answered finally, a woman, and Waxman said, “I’m sure you’ve heard by now. There’s been an explosion out near the Akers’ property.”
The operator responded, “Who is this calling, please?”
“There’s a man at the scene,” Waxman continued, ignoring her. “He’s dead. His name is Frank Maas. He’s a suspect in the murder of the Briscoe twins. He was going to retrieve something. That’s what he said, at any rate. Something hidden out in an abandoned building. But when we got there he broke and ran. The door was rigged. A bomb of some sort.”
The operator broke in, “I need to have your name, sir.”
Waxman returned the receiver to its cradle. Unable to move at first, he stood in place, rereading the message above the phone, written to a dead man. Finally, taking the same path along the edge of the room as before, he joined Abatangelo at the far side as they headed together back out to the car.
Abatangelo got behind the wheel. “Frank said he thought Shel might be out at this Mexican’s hotel.” He put the car in gear. “Let’s find ourselves a place to clean up a little.”
Chapter 21
They took a room in the first motel they found along the freeway. Waxman went to hunt up some clothes while Abatangelo stayed behind to shower. Too tired to stand, he sat in the tub, lathering himself, the shower spray pattering against his skin. As he sat there, the scene came back to him, the dash uphill, the look in Frank’s eyes- vacant, terrified, ecstatic- as he brought the rock down. The crash of pain and then Frank’s silhouette scurrying on. The sudden wash of light. The terrifying instant of pressurized silence.
The more he revisited it, the more certain he felt that Frank’s suicide was not the result of some random impulse. It was an act of atonement. He found himself envying that.
The worst of it was, the whole thing just kept shifting on him. Every fact came freighted with a counter-fact. Every insight emerged with its opposite in tow. It was maddening, like a sudden loss of gravity. And in that weightless derangement the one phrase that kept coming back to haunt him was Cohn’s: Do you have any idea how many guys come out of the joint totally fixated on doing damage to the clown who shacked up with the little woman?
He put his head in his hands. It wasn’t that he thought it was true, he just couldn’t convince himself it wasn’t true, and that felt close enough to guilt to settle the point. Regardless, he had a pretty fair idea that Shel would never forgive him. Not completely. There’d always be that doubt- You wanted it. Sure, he could tell her, tell himself, that he was only keen to save her, he was desperate, his intentions were, if not entirely pure, at least clear. But that didn’t explain the vaguely sadistic relief he’d felt, the satisfaction flickering at the edge of his horror as he’d snapped picture after picture of Frank’s smoldering, piecemeal remains. I wouldn’t cry too hard if he ended up on the bloody end of a stick.
So this is the way one learns, he thought- like Faust, like Bluebeard’s bride- there is no greater curse on earth than a gratified wish.
He increased the hot water, edging back the cold, until his skin scalded red and it hurt to sit there. He lifted his head back. The guilty are so sentimental, he thought, fingering his scapular. He pictured Shel as he’d last seen her and shortly he was unable to breathe. He put his face in his hand and the fingers came away with a melting thread of blood. He pulled himself up, stumbled, turned the water off and listened to the drain.
Yes indeed, atonement would most definitely be preferable to this.
In the mirror his eyes seemed fathomless points. On the way to the motel, he and Waxman had stopped at a drugstore to buy a tube of Unguentine. The name reminded him of a high school algebra teacher, Sister Norbertine. Named for the patron saint of soothing ointments. His hand trembled as he put the stuff to his skin.
Waxman returned with a sack of clothes and some toiletries. As Abatangelo pulled the fresh shirt and trousers from the sack, Waxman spread out on the bed a local newspaper and a map of Solano County he’d bought. He sat there staring at them, then said, “While I was out, I made another call to the police.”
Abatangelo froze. “And?”
“I had to, you realize. It was wrong, my just leaving the scene like that.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, hands clenched in his lap.
“You told them it was a suicide.”
“I gave them my name. I confirmed I was the one who’d called earlier, and said I would be contacting them later tonight or early tomorrow with a lawyer to discuss at length what happened out there. But yes, I also told them it was a suicide. I verified that.”
He looked up, his eyes a misery.
Abatangelo said, “Thank you.” Nodding toward the maps and newspaper, he added, “What’s the reading material?”
“That party I mentioned,” Waxman said, turning to open the paper, “the one for Moreira’s daughter. Turns out it’s tonight. There’s a little piece about it here in the Socials. It’s called a quinceañera, a sort of coming-out party for Mexican debutantes.” He checked the map. “From the description they give of this place, it looks like we cut through farmland, then turn south around here, near a place called Bird’s Landing.”
Abatangelo, removing pins from the shirt Waxman had bought, said, “Call your editor, Wax. You’re going to want someone to know where you are, why you’re there, and what to think if you don’t come back.”
Waxman looked up from the map. “If your intent is to frighten me, consider your work well done.”
“No,” Abatangelo said, putting his new shirt on. Stiff from sizing, it felt like butcher paper against his skin. “That’s not my intent.”
Waxman nodded. He went to the phone, called his editor, left a VoiceMail message and returned to the bed. He sat there looking toward the window. The curtains were drawn; there was no view to invite his gaze.
“This is going to sound odd,” he said finally, not turning around. “But ever since the explosion, and our walking around the flames and the debris? I’ve been unable to keep this image out of my head. It’s a schoolbook illustration, from some reader I had in grade school. It’s a picture of Icarus. He’s fallen in flames from the sky.” Waxman chuckled disconsolately. “I can’t seem to chase it from my mind.”
Abatangelo regarded him for a moment, then said, “That wasn’t a fable out there.”
Waxman looked at him finally. “Do you actually believe that these people are going to go ahead with this bizarre exchange? I mean, what has Felix Randall got to trade now?”
“It’s not about that,” Abatangelo said, pulling on his trousers. “I doubt it ever was.”
Waxman turned around to face him squarely, hands folded in his lap. “Then explain it to me.”
Abatangelo sighed. “The trick, Wax, is not to think too hard. God knows they don’t. Just a bunch of hoods, out to save their reputations.” Buckling his belt, he added, “Christ, we were fluff compared to these guys.”
“One would suppose,” Waxman said, “that no one knows that better than they do.”
“I wasn’t trying to claim privilege. Okay? I simply meant, as I recall, it was decidedly not the issue to kill anyone.”
“I think it reasonable to conclude that matters have gotten out of hand.”
Abatangelo laughed. “You’re a big help.”
“What do you want me to say? We were the blissful children of Aquarius? We were hippies and humanists, we got suckered into the concept of progress on the one hand and noble savagery on the other. Didn’t dawn on us the two conflicted just a bit. History was one grand push toward our own irrefutable excellence, except we were excellent to begin with before progress got in the way. That and a few other snags fucked up an otherwise nifty philosophy. Ergo, we learned the usual way, the ugly way, that life indeed is nasty, brutish and short, human nature is in a rut, and noble it ain’t. Basically, we’re pigs.”