Black House (Page 33)

He nudges a spatula under the edges of the hardening but still runny eggs, tilts the pan to slide them around, scrapes in the mushrooms and scallions, and folds the result in half. All right. Okay. Looks good. A luxurious forty minutes of freedom stretches out before him. In spite of everything, he seems to be functioning pretty well. Control is not an issue here.

Unfolded on the kitchen table, the La Riviere Herald catches Jack’s eye. He has forgotten about the newspaper. The newspaper has not forgotten him, however, and demands its proper share of attention. FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN, and so on. ARCTIC CIRCLE would be nice, but no, he moves nearer to the table and sees that the Fisherman remains a stubbornly local problem. From beneath the headline, Wendell Green’s name leaps up and lodges in his eye like a pebble. Wendell Green is an all-around, comprehensive pest, an ongoing irritant. After reading the first two paragraphs of Green’s article, Jack groans and clamps a hand over his eyes.

I’m a blind man, make me an umpire!

Wendell Green has the confidence of a small-town athletic hero who never left home. Tall, expansive, with a crinkly mat of red-blond hair and a senatorial waistline, Green swaggers through the bars, the courthouses, the public arenas of La Riviere and its surrounding communities, distributing wised-up charm. Wendell Green is a reporter who knows how to act like one, an old-fashioned print journalist, the Herald’s great ornament.

At their first encounter, the great ornament struck Jack as a third-rate phony, and he has seen no reason to change his mind since then. He distrusts Wendell Green. In Jack’s opinion, the reporter’s gregarious facade conceals a limitless capacity for treachery. Green is a blowhard posturing in front of a mirror, but a canny blowhard, and such creatures will do anything to gain their own ends.

After Thornberg Kinderling’s arrest, Green requested an interview. Jack turned him down, as he declined the three invitations that followed his removal to Norway Valley Road. His refusals had not deterred the reporter from staging occasional "accidental" meetings.

The day after the discovery of Amy St. Pierre’s body, Jack emerged from a Chase Street dry cleaner’s shop with a box of freshly laundered shirts under his arm, began walking toward his car, and felt a hand close on his elbow. He looked back and beheld, contorted into a leer of spurious delight, the florid public mask of Wendell Green.

— Hey, hey, Holly — . A bad-boy smirk. I mean, Lieutenant Sawyer. Hey, I’m glad I ran into you. This is where you have your shirts done? They do a good job?

— If you leave out the part about the buttons.

— Good one. You’re a funny guy, Lieutenant. Let me give you a tip. Reliable, on Third Street in La Riviere? They live up to their name. No smashee, no breakee. Want your shirts done right, go to a Chink every time. Sam Lee, try him out, Lieutenant.

— I’m not a lieutenant anymore, Wendell. Call me Jack or Mr. Sawyer. Call me Hollywood, I don’t care. And now —

He walked toward his car, and Wendell Green walked beside him.

— Any chance of a few words, Lieutenant? Sorry, Jack? Chief Gilbertson is a close friend of yours, I know, and this tragic case, little girl, apparently mutilated, terrible things, can you can offer us your expertise, step in, give us the benefit of your thoughts?

— You want to know my thoughts?

— Anything you can tell me, buddy.

Pure, irresponsible malice inspired Jack to extend an arm over Green’s shoulders and say:

— Wendell, old buddy, check out a guy named Albert Fish. It was back in the twenties.

— Fisch?

— F-i-s-h. From an old-line WASP New York family. An amazing

case. Look it up.

Until that moment, Jack had been barely conscious of remembering the outrages committed by the bizarre Mr. Albert Fish. Butchers more up-to-date — Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer — had eclipsed Albert Fish, not to mention exotics like Edmund Emil Kemper III, who, after committing eight murders, decapitated his mother, propped her head on his mantel, and used it as a dartboard. (By way of explanation, Edmund III said, "This seemed appropriate.") Yet the name of Albert Fish, an obscure back number, had surfaced in Jack’s mind, and into Wendell Green’s ready ear he had uttered it.

What had gotten into him? Well, that was the question, wasn’t it?

Whoops, the omelette. Jack grabs a plate from a cabinet, silverware from a drawer, jumps to the stove, turns off the burner, and slides the mess in the pan onto his plate. He sits down and opens the Herald to page 5, where he reads about Milly Kuby’s nearly winning third place at the big statewide spelling bee, but for the substitution of an i for an a in opopanax, the kind of thing that is supposed to be in a local paper. How can you expect a kid to spell opopanax correctly, anyhow?

Jack takes two or three bites of his omelette before the peculiar taste in his mouth distracts him from the monstrous unfairness done to Milly Kuby. The funny taste is like half-burned garbage. He spits the food out of his mouth and sees a wad of gray mush and raw, half-chewed vegetables. The uneaten part of his breakfast does not look any more appetizing. He did not cook this omelette; he ruined it.

He drops his head and groans. A shudder like a loose electrical wire travels here and there through his body, throwing off sparks that singe his throat, his lungs, his suddenly palpitating organs. Opopanax, he thinks. I’m falling apart. Right here and now. Forget I said that. The savage opopanax has gripped me in its claws, shaken me with the fearful opopanax of its opopanax arms, and intends to throw me into the turbulent Opopanax River, where I shall meet my opopanax.

"What is happening to me?" he says aloud. The shrill sound of his voice scares him.