“How marvelous for you.”
“I’m here about your son, Reggie.”
“A term best used loosely.”
“Pardon?”
“I told Helen from the outset: I don’t fancy squandering my life and treasure on a stranger’s mistakes.”
Jacob said, “He was adopted.”
“Of course he bloody was. No natural son of mine would’ve turned out that way. What’s he done in Los Angeles?”
Jacob noted the syntax: not what’s he doing but what’s he done. “I’m not sure.”
“Rather a long way to come in a state of doubt.”
“Was he in Prague last April?”
“Prague?”
“In the Czech Republic.”
“I know where Prague is, you prat.”
Heap swallowed wetly and plucked another piece of toffee, leaving seventeen in the box.
“Absolutely, perfectly revolting,” he muttered.
Jacob had an idea that the conversation would last as long as the candy. “Do you know if he’s been there?”
“I do not, nor do I care. He’s a grown man, or so says the law. He may go where he pleases. Nor can I see what an American police officer’s got to do with any of it.”
Jacob glanced at the gun. Close enough that he could get to it if necessary, wrest it away. “I’m afraid I have some bad news. Prague police found a body that appears to be his.”
Heap stopped chewing.
“I’m sorry,” Jacob said.
Heap leaned against the balustrade, his eyes bulging as he gulped the half-chewed toffee.
The rifle clunked down, and he clutched his chest. Jacob reached for him, but Heap swatted his hand away, breathing savagely. “What happened.”
“Are you okay, sir?”
“What happened.”
Jacob said, “It’s not entirely clear. It appears that he was murdered—”
“‘Appears’? What the bloody hell’s the matter with you? Murdered by whom?”
“We’re still working on that—”
“Well work on it, you idiot. Don’t stand there asking me questions.”
“I’m so sorry to have to tell you this.”
“I don’t give a toss how sorry you are. I want to know what happened.”
“It appears—”
Heap snatched up the gun and leveled it at Jacob’s midsection. “You dare tell me one more time what it appears to be and I’ll paint my house with your guts.”
A beat.
Jacob said, “He tried to rape a woman.”
Heap said nothing; nor did he react.
“She fought him off and fled the scene,” Jacob said. “When the police returned to look for him, they found him dead. Murdered.”
“How.”
“... how?”
“How was he murdered?”
“He was...” Jacob cleared his throat. “He was decapitated.”
The rifle wavered in Heap’s hands.
Jacob said, “I know it’s hard.”
Heap smiled sourly. “Do you have a son?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Then you don’t know what it’s like to find out he’s been murdered, do you?”
“No, sir.”
“And, consequently, you don’t have the faintest notion of how hard it is.”
Jacob said, “None.”
A silence.
“If you could show me a photo,” Jacob said. “I need to confirm that it was him.”
The gun swung loosely at Heap’s side. He went in through the French doors. Jacob followed.
Chapter forty-one
“I suppose you’ll be wanting money for the funeral.”
In the minutes it had taken Heap to stow his rifle and confiscate the remaining toffee, he had recovered his cool, along with his contempt.
“You won’t be having it from me, I can assure you of that.”
A burled walnut gun cabinet dominated the ground floor library. Discolored patches of flooring and wallpaper spoke of rolled-up rugs, bygone art. There was an aluminum frame cot, surplus woolen blanket, and tousled linens. Cans of baked beans and tinned asparagus were stacked, incongruously, atop a baroque demilune table. Between its carved feet sat an electric hot plate and a crusty frying pan.
Heap dropped the string of hares, their dead bodies reviving a giddy crop of dust bunnies.
He headed for the stairs. “Don’t gawk.”
Jacob had been wrong about the upper-story windows. They hadn’t been left open. They’d been shot out, as had portions of the banister. The whole house, in fact, had been given over to target practice. Bullet holes pockmarked the walls and ceiling, ranging in size from small-caliber puncture wounds to catastrophic shotgun blasts that laid bare the plumbing. While the damage didn’t follow a consistent pattern — some rooms were untouched, others hardly existed at all — the effort behind it spoke to a certain perverse dedication.
In a strange way, the place reminded him of Fred Pernath’s house in Hancock Park. Both suggested the same hermetic impulse, the masculine will to power gone haywire, reveling in its inhospitality.
A house was a body; to kill it, pick your method. Fred Pernath had chosen strangulation, clogging out light and life, like a heart bursting with fat. Edwyn Heap, the inverse, a gradual erosion of the boundary between inside and out.
There was also the shared lack of family photos, although Jacob supposed that, in Heap’s case, that could be construed as a kindness. Anything hung on the wall was subject to be being blown to smithereens.
“Did Reggie come home often?” he asked.
“Helen would let him stay when he was hard up,” Heap said. He was wheezing as they climbed. “Once she died, I put my foot down.”
“When was that?”
“Four years, September. The woman had a spine of gravy.”
“Has he been back since?”
“Not long after the funeral he turned up looking for something to pinch and sell. I chased him off and that’s the last time I laid eyes on him.”
On the second floor, they came to a door so long shut that the paint around the frame had adhered to itself. Heap shouldered it open and it swung wide, wobbling on its hinges.
“The chamber of the little prince.”
The little prince, who would’ve been in his mid-forties had he not died, had once been a boy, and Jacob felt a chill as he regarded an otherwise ordinary boy’s room. Tight duvet, race-car pattern, as though the occupant had not progressed beyond age nine. Textbooks, gooseneck desk lamp, CD player — tape deck combo.
No DIY taxidermy.
No knife collection.
That there was nothing sinister about it made it somehow more sinister.
What had gone wrong?
When had it happened? How?
A handful of items hinted at maturity. A reclining female nude — poster for an Egon Schiele retrospective at the Tate — affixed to the walls with yellowing tape. A framed certificate from the Oxford Undergraduate Art Society, acknowledging Heap’s first prize for his drawing titled To Be Brasher.
Edwyn Heap plucked a school photo off the desk.
“And the prince himself.”
Aswim in a sea of starchy white and somber black, the young Reggie Heap had a hunted look, sweat flashing on his forehead, his eyes seeking an escape route.
“It was a mistake to send him up,” Edwyn Heap said. “He didn’t stand a chance.” He tossed the photo on the desk. “Well. What do you intend to do about it?”
Jacob used his camera to take a picture of the picture. It came out blurry; he tried again. Better. “I was hoping you could give me a starting point. A last address, maybe.”
“He didn’t have one.”
“He must’ve lived somewhere.”
“Not to my knowledge. He went here, he went there.”