Strangers

Page 44

The last will and testament of Alan Arthur Rykoff, which he had left with Pepper for safekeeping, was a simple preprinted onepage form of the type obtainable at any business supply store.
Jorja sat on a cobaltblue Ultrasuede chair beside a lacquered black Tavola table, quickly scanning the will in the light from a hightech, burnishedsteel, coneshaped lamp. The most surprising thing was not that Alan had named Jorja as executor, but that he had left what he owned to Marcie, whose fatherhood he had been prepared to deny.
Pepper sat on a black lacquered chair with white upholstery, near a wall of windows. "I don't figure it's much of an estate. He spent money pretty freely. But there's his car, some jewelry."
Jorja noticed that Alan's will had been notarized just four days ago, and she shivered. "He must've been considering suicide when he had this notarized; otherwise, he wouldn't have felt the need for it."
Pepper shrugged. “I guess.”
“But didn't you see the danger? Didn't you see he was troubled?”
“Like I told you, honey, he'd been weird for a couple months.”
"Yes, but there must've been a noticeable change in him during the last few days, something different from that other strangeness. When he told you he'd made out a will and asked you to put it in that lockbox of yours, didn't you wonder?
Wasn't there anything about himhis manner, his look, his state of mindthat worried you?"
Pepper stood up impatiently. "I'm no psychologist, honey. His stuff's in the bedroom. If you want to give his clothes to Goodwill, I'll call them. But his other stuffjewelry, personal thingsyou can get them out of here right now. I'll show you where everything is."
Jorja was sickened by the moral squalor into which Alan had sunk, but she also felt a measure of guilt for his death. Could she have done something to save him? By leaving his few possessions to Marcie and by naming Jorja executor of his will, he seemed to have reached out to them in his last days, and although that gesture was pathetic and inadequate, it touched Jorja. She tried to remember how he had sounded on the telephone before Christmas, when she had last spoken with him. She remembered his coldness, arrogance, and selfishness, but perhaps there had been other more subtle things that she should have heard beneath the surface cruelty and bravado: distress, confusion, loneliness, fear.
Brooding on that, she followed Pepper toward the bed room. She loathed this task, pawing through Alan's things, but it had to be done.
Halfway down a long hall, Pepper stopped at a door, pushed it inward. “Oh, shit. I can't believe the damned cops left it like this.”
Jorja looked in the open door before she realized that this was the bathroom in which Alan had killed himself. Blood was all over the beige tile floor. More blood was spattered over the glass door of the shower stall, sink, towels, wastecan, and toilet. The wall behind the toilet was stained with dried blood in a macabre pattern resembling a Rorschach blot, as if Alan's psychological condition and the meaning of his death were there to be read by anyone with sufficient insight.
“Shot himself twice,” Pepper said, supplying details Jorja did not want to hear. "First in the crotch. Is that queer or what? Then he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger."
Jorja could smell the vague coppery scent of blood.
“The damned cops should've cleaned up the worst of it,” Pepper said, as if she thought policemen ought to be armed not only with guns but with scrub brushes and soap. "My housekeeper doesn't come until Monday. And she's not going to want to deal with this disgusting mess."
Jorja broke the bloody bathroom's hypnotic hold on her and stumbled blindly a few steps along the hall.
“Hey,” Pepper Carrafield said, “you okay?”
Jorja gagged, clenched her teeth, moved quickly along the hall, and leaned against the jamb of another doorway.
“Hey, honey, you were still carrying a torch for him, weren't you?”
“No,” Jorja said softly.
Pepper moved closer, too close, putting an unwanted consoling hand upon her shoulder. “Sure, you were. Jesus, I'm sorry.” Pepper oozed unctuous sympathy, and Jorja wondered if the woman was capable of any genuine emotion that did not have its roots in selfinterest. "You said you were burnt out on him, but I should've seen."
Jorja wanted to shout: You stupid bitch, I'm not carrying a torch for him, but he was still a human being, for Christ's sake. How can you be so callous? What's wrong with you? Is something migsing in you?
But she only said, "I'm all right. I'm all right. Where are his things? I want to sort through them and get out of here."
Pepper ushered Jorja through the doorway in which she had been leaning, into a bedroom. "He had the bottom drawers of the highboy, plus the left side of the dresser, and that half of the closet. I'll help." She pulled out the lowest drawer of the highboy.
For Jorja, the room suddenly was as eerie and unreal as a place in a dream. Her heart began to pound, and she moved around the bed toward the first of three things that had filled her with fear. Books. Half a dozen books were stacked on the nightstand. She had seen the word “moon” on the spines of two of them. With trembling hands, she sorted through them and found that all six dealt with the same subject.
“Something wrong?” Pepper asked.
Jorja moved to the dresser, on which stood a globe the size of a basketball. A cord trailed from it. She clicked a switch on the cord and found the globe was opaque with a light inside. It was not a globe of the earth but of the moon, with geological featurescraters, ridges, plainsclearly named. She gave the glowing sphere a spin.
The third thing that frightened her was a telescope on a tripod beside the dresser, in front of a window. Nothing about the instrument was different from other amateur telescopes, but to Jorja it seemed ominous, even dangerous, with dark and unknowable associations.
“Those're Alan's things,” Pepper said.
“He was interested in astronomy? Since when?”
“For the past couple months,” Pepper said.
The similarities between Alan's and Marcie's conditions troubled Jorja. Marcie's irrational fear of doctors. Alan's compulsive sex drive. Those were different psychological problemsobsessive fear in one case, obsessive attraction in the otherbut they shared the element of obsession. Apparently, Marcie had been cured of her phobia. Alan was not as fortunate. He'd had no one to help him, and he had snapped, shooting off the gen**als that had come to control him, putting a bullet in his brain. Jorja shuddered. It was too coincidental that father and daughter had been stricken by psychological problems simultaneously, but what made it more than coincidence was the other strangeness they shared: their interest in the moon. Alan had not seen Marcie in six months, and their most recent phone conversation had been in September, weeks before either had become fascinated by the moon. There had been no contact by which either could have transmitted that fascination to the other; it appeared to have sprung up spontaneously in each of them.
Remembering Marcie's moontroubled sleep, Jorja said, "Do you know if he was having unusual dreams? About the moon?"
"Yeah. How'd you figure that? He was having them, but he could never remember any details when he woke up. They started . . . back in late October, I think it was. Why? What's it matter?"
“These dreamswere they nightmares?”
Pepper shook her head. "Not exactly. I'd hear him talking in his sleep. Sometimes he sounded afraid, but lots of times he'd smile, too."
Jorja felt as if ice had formed in her marrow.
She turned to look at the lighted globe of the moon.
What in the hell is going on? she wondered. A shared dream? Is that possible? How? Why?
Behind her, Pepper said, “Are you okay?”
Something had driven Alan to suicide.
What might happen to Marcie?
8.
Saturday, January 11
Boston, Massachusetts.
The memorial service for Pablo Jackson was held at eleven o'clock Saturday morning, January 11, in a nondenominational chapel on the grounds of the cemetery where he was to be buried. The coroner and police pathologists had not been finished with the body until Thursday, so five days had passed between Pablo's murder and his funeral.
When the last eulogy was delivered, the mourners adjourned to the grave, where the casket waited. Snow had been cleared around Pablo's plot, but the space was insufficient. Scores of people stood outside the prepared area, some in snow deeper than their boots. Others remained on the sidewalks that crisscrossed the memorial park, watching from a distance. Three hundred had come to pay their last respects
to the old magician. The chilly air steamed with the breath of the rich and the poor, the famous and the unknown, Boston socialites, magicians.
Ginger Weiss and Rita Hannaby stood in the first circle around the gravesite. Since Monday, Ginger had not had much of an appetite and had gotten little sleep. She was pale, nervous, and very tired.
Both Rita and George had argued against Ginger's attendance at the services. They were concerned that such a wrenchingly emotional experience would trigger a fugue. But the police had encouraged her, hoping she might see Pablo's killer at the services. In selfdefense she'd hidden the truth from the cops, leading them to believe that the killer was an ordinary burglar, and sometimes burglars were driven by such sick compulsions. But she knew that he was no mere burglar and that he would not risk arrest by coming to the cemetery.
Ginger wept during the eulogies, and by the time she walked from the chapel to the grave, her grief was a vise squeezing her heart. But she did not lose control. She was determined not to make a circus of this solemn occasion, determined to pay her respects with dignity.
Besides, she had come with a second purpose that could not be fulfilled if she spiraled down into a fugue or suffered an emotional collapse. She was sure that Alexander Christophsonformer Ambassador to Great Britain, former United States Senator, and former Director of the CIAwould be at the funeral of his old friend, and she wanted very much to speak with him. It was to Christophson, on Christmas Day, that Pablo had turned for advice about Ginger's problems. And it was Alex Christophson who had told him about the Azrael Block. She had an important question to ask Christophson, though she dreaded the answer.
She had seen him in the chapel, recognized him from his days in public life, when he had been on television and in newspapers. He was a striking figure, tall, thin, whitehaired, unmistakable. Now, they stood on opposite sides of the grave, the draped casket between them. He had glanced at her a couple times, though without recognition.
The minister said a brief final prayer. After a moment, some of the mourners greeted one another, formed small groups to talk. Others, including Christophson, moved away through a forest of headstones, past snowladen pines and winterstripped maples, toward the parking lot.
“I've got to talk to that man,” Ginger told Rita. “Be right back.”
Startled, Rita called after her, but Ginger did not pause or offer further explanation. She caught up with Christophson in the jagged shadows cast by the skeletal branches of an immense oak that was all black bark and crusted snow. She called his name, and he turned. He had piercing gray eyes, which widened when she told him who she was.
“I can't help you,” he said, and began to turn away from her.
“Please,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. "If you blame me for what happened to Pablo-"
“Why should you care what I think, Doctor?”
She held fast to his arm. “Wait. Please, for God's sake.”
Christophson surveyed the slowly dispersing crowd in the cemetery, and Ginger knew that he was afraid the wrong peopledangerous peoplemight see him with her and assume he was helping her as Pablo had done. His head twitched slightly, and Ginger thought it was an indication of his nervousness, but then she realized it was the faint tremor of Parkinson's disease. He said, "Dr. Weiss, if you're seeking some form of absolution, then by all means let me provide it. Pablo knew the risks, and he accepted them. He was the captain of his own fate."
“Did he understand the risks? That's what I've got to know.”
Christophson seemed surprised. “I warned him myself.”
“Warned him about who? About what?”
"I don't know who or what. But considering the enormous effort expended to tamper with your memory, you must've seen something of tremendous importance. I warned Pablo that whoever had brainwashed you was no amateur and that if they realized the two of you were trying to break through the Azrael Block, they might come after not just you but him as well." Christophson's gray eyes searched her eyes for a moment, and then he sighed. “He did tell you about his conversation with me?”
“He told me everythingexcept about your warning. ” Her eyes filled with tears again. “He didn't breathe a word of that.”
He withdrew one elegant but palsied hand from his pocket
and gripped her arm reassuringly. "Doctor, now that you've told me this, I can't possibly lay any of the blame at your doorstep."
“But I blame me,” Ginger said in a voice thin with misery.
“No. You can't blame yourself for any of it.” Looking around again to make sure they were not under surveillance, Christophson opened the top two buttons of his overcoat, reached inside, plucked the display handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit jacket, and gave it to Ginger. "Please stop punishing yourself. Our friend lived a full and fortunate life, Doctor. His death might've been violent, but it was relatively quick, which can be a blessing."
Drying her eyes on the swatch of pale blue silk that he had given her, Ginger said, “He was a dear man.”
“He was,” Christophson agreed. "And I'm beginning to understand why he took the risks he did for you. He said you were a very dear woman, and I see his judgment was as accurate and reliable as usual."
She finished blotting her eyes. Her heart still felt pinched in a vise, but she began to believe there was a chance that guilt and grief would eventually give way to grief alone. “Thank you.” As much to herself as to him, Ginger said, "What now?
Where do I go from here?"
“I'm in no position to help you,” he said at once. "I've been out of the intelligence business for almost a decade, and I've no contacts any more. I've no idea who might be behind your memory block or why."
"I wouldn't ask you to help me. I'm not risking any more innocent lives. I just thought you might have some idea how I can help myself."