SUMMER of FEAR (5 page)

What sat most disagreeably upon my opinion of Erik Wald, though, was the
simple fact that he had applied to the Sheriff’s Academy three times and been
rejected each. This was common knowledge in the department and had even been
written after in the first feature articles regarding Wald's unconventional
help in identifying Cary Clough. Wald suffered from mitral-valve prolapse, a
leaking heart valve brought on by fever in his infancy. I was pleased that Wald
couldn't make the physical cut, though you certainly wouldn't have known it by
looking at him. His powers of compensation were magnificent. More important,
however, I was solidly resentful of the fact that he had risen to such
prominence with the Sheriff's without ever making grade to join it. I saw him
as some kind of immune diplomat, running stylish circles around myself and the
other rank-and-file deputies. And I will confess, too, that the wit and clarity
his dissertation language infuriated me. I envied him. I found ludicrous his
intimations of securing, someday, a paid position as undersheriff to Dan
Winters. His ego seemed to have no limit. I derived an arid comfort from realizing
that his insight into character of Cary Clough came at least in part from
kindred rumblings in his own thrice-rejected soul.

Four years later, when I was working on
Journey Up River,
Wald
offered me some astonishing insight into the mind of the killer, who turned out
to be a forty-one-year-old part-time butcher (really) named Art Crump. Crump
was not yet a suspect at the time of my interviews with Erik. Upon Crump's
arrest, most of the "insight" turned out to be misleading, useless,
or wildly ass-backward. I used it in the book anyway, much to the embarrassment
of Erik. Crump and I had a laugh at this up in Vacaville.

But I knew why Amber had been drawn to Erik Wald: Amber was always drawn
to men who could inflict harm. And never since my first meeting of Wald did I
doubt that his fury, if unleashed, might prove formidable.

So I called Amber's agent and said I was Erik Wald and asked whether he
could tell me if Amber was on a shoot today.

He chuckled in the way that only busy, superior people can do.

"Just one moment," he said.

The next voice that come on was one of the last I
expected.

"This
is Erik Wald. Who the hell are you?"

I told him. Erik laughed, too. It was a low, even baritone that spoke of
advantage. I let him laugh some more. I could hear Amber's agent—Reuben
Saltz—in the background, joining in. When the hilarity had waned, I asked him
whether Amber was on a shoot or not.

"Why?"

"It's about Grace."

I'm a good liar. Grace is Amber's daughter.

"Why not talk to Grace about Grace? She's a big
girl now."

"I know that, Erik. Finding her is the hard part. I was hoping
Amber could—

"Finding Amber isn't any easier. She was supposed to work today, a
shampoo deal, but she never showed. Nobody knows where she is. With five grand
an hour at stake, Reuben here is a quivering mass of anxiety and thwarted
greed."

I tried to sound casual. "Maybe she stayed home
sick."

"Reuben has called every hour since ten. I imagine you have, too,
if you really needed her. Reuben is enterprising, though. He just got back from
the Wilson manse in Laguna— nobody home."

The demons starting stirring in my blood again. "Maybe she was
sleeping one off."

"Nobody
home
is what I said, Russ. Reuben, the concerned
mentor, has a key."

It was one of those moments when the gravity inside your chest seems to
multiply. My heart felt as if it were down next to the seat belt. I turned the
air conditioner on high and aimed the stream into my eyes. What could possibly
have happened? Didn't Reuben go upstairs?

"Well," I said, trying to steady the breath in my throat. "You know Amber."

"We know Amber," said Wald. "If I find her first, I'll
tell her you were looking for her. Heh, heh."

"Heh, heh. I'll do the same."

Trying to sound satisfied, I changed the topic. "What’s your call
on the Ellisons and that Mexican couple?"

"I believe the cops, for right now. Talk to
Marty yet?'

"Sure."

"I did, too, last week. The captain doth protest too much. To me,
it looks bad. Blunt-force trauma. Quite a ring to it. Bashers are furious, very
bold, and poor personal groomers. They sometimes affect beards. They often see
themselves as outdoorsmen, lovers of nature. They also have the problem of what
to do with their blunt instruments—leave 'em or keep 'em? You know what
intrigues me? His marks are all minorities. I sense the offspring some racist,
archconservative, neofascist John Birch Society Orange Countians. So stay on
it, Russ—maybe there's another book in it for you. Speaking of which, I saw
Under Scorpio
Crown for a buck ninety-eight yesterday. Hardcover."

The two-dollar shelf at Crown is a pillory. On the other hand, a book is
a book and a lot of hard work goes into one and some are bound to do better
than others.

"It wasn't that bad a book. I took some chances."

"So did Custer. I bought six anyway. Gifts, you
know.

"Thanks, Erik. Still enjoying your appointment as Amber Mae's
financial czar?"

"Yes. Consulting with Mr. Saltz on any of Amber's many financial
messes is a balm to me. Not surprisingly, she only trusts me with the small
stuff, the
liquid diet,
she calls it."

This I understood. Amber's parsimony and hypercautiousness regarding
money had been clear to me from the beginning, back when she was poor and had
good enough reason to act that way. I recalled a caustic remark from Martin
Parish, made a few years ago, after Amber had "settled" their divorce
with a mere $75,000 for the vastly out earned Marty—something to the effect of
her wallet being even tighter than her ass. Could Martin's resentment have
festered? I also recalled, oh, quite clearly, how Amber had previously offered
me that same amount—$75,000—as enticement to keep me from filing a palimony
suit. I had no intention of suing her, nor of accepting the money, and I
clearly remember the bitterly comic battles we had over the issue.

What I would have given at that point, some twenty years later, to have
$75,000 in the bank!

"I can smell her perfume on the checks," said Erik. "I'd
screw them if I could get them to hold still long enough. It's amazing how a
person so beautiful and bright can be so stupid. Speaking of beauty, how is
Izzy?"

"Isabella is perfect."

"Your insurance doing what it's supposed
to?"

"Yes."

"Let me know if there's something I can do for you two. We rejects
have to stand together."

"The proud, the many."

"Take care, Russell, and don't try to pass yourself off as me
again. You're not nearly smart, handsome, or dangerous enough."

"But I've got the same pain-in-the-ass
attitude."

"Mine's better. It comes from the heart."

"When did you get one of those?"

That night,
distressed and despairing, I made dinner for Isabella Our dinners were always
complex productions because Isabel was once a superlative cook and loves to
eat. The steroids she was taking to reduce swelling in her head also gave her a
robust appetite. She planned the menu; I followed her directions as best I
could. The maid prepared breakfast and lunch, then went home. Dinnertime was
strictly for us.

Isabella
would sit in her wheelchair and direct. She was rested by then, up from a long
afternoon nap that sometime started after lunch. I would fuss around in the
kitchen, trying to do things right, open a bottle of wine, and start in on it.
We would talk.

It
was a lot like the old days, if anything can be said to be the way it was
before you have a massive seizure, are diagnosed with an inoperable tumor,
undergo an experimental radiation-implant procedure, and lose most of the use
of your legs because of it. No, it was really not very much like the ole days
at all. In fact, Isabella couldn't even look at pictures of herself from
earlier times. The smiling, black-haired woman she saw in them seemed a prior
blessing that had since been revoked. Isabella is not a vain person—no more
than any of us are—but to see that old, strong, vital self was too much for
her. She was a big woman. She had gone from 130 shapely, capable pounds to
almost 200. Her coal black hair (Isabella is of Mexican descent, her maiden
name is Sandoval) had fallen out with the treatments, every last beautiful,
wavy shoulder-length strand. Her legs had shrunken from disuse.

It was all that Isabella—a woman who could once skip along on one ski
behind a boat doing forty miles an hour— could do to struggle up from her chair
and use the cane to move across a room. The stairs leading up to our bedroom
were impossible, so we had an elevator installed. The first time Isabella used
it, she put on a pair of angels' wings and a halo that she'd worn to a costume
party just a few months before. On her lap, she carried the plastic toy-store
harp. She started out smiling and ended up crying. I stood there and watched
her descend, filled with that strange combination of love for this woman and
fury at what had happened to her.

Isabella's world fluctuated between transcendent humor and bitter
despair. So did mine.

One thing that Isabella's disease hadn't threatened was her piano
playing, the lovely sounds of which would fill our home each afternoon when she
got up from her nap. She played Bach and Mozart; she played the show tunes of
the thirties, she played Jerry Lee and Elton John; but most of all she played
her own compositions, which had come, over the last year, to be the most
achingly longing music I had ever heard. When her chords echoed through our
stilt house on late afternoons, it was as if Isabella herself were in the air,
vibrating through every particle of the place that we called home. It was her
breath, her heart, her life. She no longer taught—travel was too difficult and
she didn't want her students to see the weight she'd gain and the hair she'd
lost. No, Isabella's music was no Ionger profession, but it was one of the two main
things that kept her sane. The other—I realized later—was me.

That night, she had chosen an impossible recipe—roast lamb and a chutney
sauce I couldn't get right. The vegetables were slaughtered. The rice was
dripping but hard. The meat was overdone. Every time I looked down into my
wineglass, I saw the puddled ooze on Amber's carpet. I drank the bottle fast.

We were sitting outside on the deck, next to each other, facing south
down the canyon toward the sea. Isabella spent hours there during the day, staring
off at the parched hills.

"You drink a lot of wine," she said.

"I'm a lot of man."

"Well," she said finally, "be careful, Russ. It's getting
be every night. More than a little."

"I know."

"It w-w-worries me."

The truth of the matter is that I was drinking an awful lot then. There
were two different worlds for me—the regular one and the one I could enter
through alcohol. I preferred the latter. It was a place of only the past and
the future, no present, place where action won out over thought, where possibility
seemed to wait. There was no cancer in it. I was drunk when I'd called Amber
the night before. I was drunk when I'd gone over there. Sober, I'd have done
neither. Sober, my world had begun to be a land of pure obligation and utility.
I felt like a post in the ground. But from the bottle called the twin worlds of
yesterday and tomorrow—thoughtless acceleration, unrestrained speed. I needed
motion. I craved it.

So I opened the second bottle. The sun had gone down but there was still
an orange glow over the hills. A vulture Ianded on the power pole and looked
down at us. I despised it. It was a huge bird, and Izzy had named him Black
Death. She named a lot of things in our hillsides. I threw the empty wine
bottle at it and it flew away. The bottle vanished into the sagebrush that
thrives on our thirsty hillside. Predictably, with all the new development to
the south and west behind Laguna, the displaced wildlife has begun to
concentrate in our hills. Deer and coyote abound, much to the denigration of
local roses and cats. Hawks and vultures fill the air daily, and I have
spotted, just recently and for the first time, several bobcats. I killed two
five-foot rattlesnakes on my driveway last summer and captured a third that had
two heads, which I donated to the Los Angeles Zoo. An older woman on our street
was walking her teacup poodle one spring afternoon, only to have the tiny dog
swept from the pavement by a vulture (possibly Black Death himself). Since the
vulture is, according to ornithologists, strictly a scavenger, the vulture
attack was downgraded to a hawk attack by the local press. But I know the old
woman—her name is Astrid Kilfoy— and she's lived in this canyon long enough to
tell a vulture from a red-tail. As nature is compressed, she metastasizes
terrible, aberrant things. Like the tumor in Isabella's skull. Like the Midnight
Eye.

I told Isabella about my day—mainly hanging around the cops trying to
get the scent for my next book. I came
that
close to telling her about
Amber, but
that
close was still a million miles away.