“Sit still. I’ll get it,” I said, for I could fetch the Cabernet from the kitchen in the time that he would require merely to lever himself up from his armchair.
The ten-foot-wide hallway served as a gallery for fine art, and opening off both sides of it were rooms rich with still more art and books.
At the end of the hall lay the kitchen. On a black-granite counter stood the bottle, uncorked to let the wine breathe.
Although the front rooms had been comfortably air-conditioned, the kitchen proved to be surprisingly warm. Entering, I thought for an instant that all four ovens must be filled with baking treats.
Then I saw that the back door stood open. The desert evening, still broiling in the stubborn summer sun, had sucked the coolness from the kitchen.
When I stepped to the door to close it, I saw Bob Robertson in the backyard, as pale and fungoid as ever he had looked.
SEVENTEEN
ROBERTSON STOOD FACING THE HOUSE, AS though waiting for me to see him. Then he turned and walked toward the back of the property.
For too long, I hesitated in the doorway, uncertain what I should do.
I assumed that one of his neighbors might have recognized me and might have told him that earlier I’d been snooping around during his absence. But the swiftness with which he’d tracked me down and had begun to tail me was disconcerting.
My paralysis broke with the realization that I had endangered Ozzie, had led this psychopath to his house. I left the kitchen, crossed the porch, descended the steps to a patio, stepped onto the lawn, and went after Robertson.
Ozzie’s house sits at the front of his one-acre lot, and most of the property is given over to lawn and to trees that screen him from his neighbors. In the back half of the acre, the trees grow thicker than at the front, and stand close enough to qualify as a small woods.
Into this copse of laurel, podocarpus, and California pepper, Robertson strode—and disappeared from view.
The westward-dawdling sun slanted between the trees where it could find narrow gaps, but for the most part the layered branches successfully resisted it. Cooler than the sun-baked lawn, these greenery-scented shadows were nevertheless warm, and they pressed against me in stifling folds.
No less than the cloying shadows, the trunks of the many trees offered concealment. My quarry made good use of them.
I tacked quickly but warily through the woods, north to south, then south to north, first in silence, then calling his name—“Mr. Robertson?”—but he didn’t answer.
The few intruding flares of sunlight inhibited rather than assisted the search. They illuminated little but were just numerous enough to prevent my eyes from adjusting well to the gloom.
Afraid of leaving the woods unsearched and therefore giving Robertson a chance to creep in behind me, I took too long to get to the gate in the back fence. I found it closed, but it was held by a gravity latch that would have engaged automatically when it fell shut behind him.
The gate opened into a picturesque brick-paved alleyway, flanked by back fences and garages, shaded here and there by queen palms and willowy pepper trees. Neither Bob Robertson nor anyone else was afoot as far as I could see in either direction.
Returning through the woodlet, I half expected him to lunge at me, not gone after all but waiting to catch me with my guard down. If Robertson was hiding in that grove, he must have recognized that I remained alert, for he didn’t risk an assault.
When I reached the back porch, I stopped, turned, and studied the pocket forest. Birds flew from those branches, not as if chased out by anything, but only as if taking a last flight before sunset.
In the kitchen again, I closed the door. I engaged the deadbolt lock. And the security chain.
I peered through the windowpanes in the upper half of the door. Peaceful, the woods. And still.
When I returned to the living room with the bottle of Cabernet, half the cheese had disappeared from the canape plate, and Little Ozzie was still ensconced in his commodious chair, where he himself had once said that he looked as cozy as the Toad King on his throne. “Dear Odd, I was beginning to think you’d stepped through a wardrobe into Narnia.”
I told him about Robertson.
“You mean,” Ozzie said, “that he was here, in my house?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said as I refilled his wineglass.
“Doing what?”
“Probably standing in the hall, just beyond that archway, listening to us talk.”
“That’s damn bold.”
Setting the bottle on a coaster beside his glass, striving hard to repress the palsy of fear that would have trembled my hands, I said, “No more bold than I was when I slipped into his house to poke through his drawers.”
“I suppose not. But then you’re on the side of the gods, and this bastard sounds like a giant albino cockroach on a day pass from Hell.”
Terrible Chester had moved from the windowsill to my chair. He raised his head to challenge me for possession of the seat. His eyes are as green as those of a scheming demon.
“If I were you,” Ozzie advised, “I would sit elsewhere.” He indicated the bottle of wine. “Won’t you have a second glass?”
“Haven’t quite finished my first,” I said, “and I’ve really got to be going. Stormy Llewellyn, dinner—all of that. But don’t get up.”
“Don’t tell me not to get up,” he grumped as he began the process of disengaging his bulk from armchair cushions that, like the hungry jaws of an exotic flesh-eating plant, had closed with considerable suction around his thighs and buttocks.
“Sir, it’s really not necessary.”
“Don’t tell me what’s necessary, you presumptuous pup. What’s necessary is whatever I wish to do, regardless of how unnecessary it might seem.”
Sometimes when he gets up after having been seated for a while, his complexion reddens with the effort, and at other times he goes sheet-white. I’m frightened to think that such a simple thing as rising from a chair should tax him so much.
Fortunately, his face neither flushed nor paled this time. Perhaps fortified by the wine and burdened by only half a plate of cheese, he was on his feet markedly faster than a desert tortoise extracting itself from a dry slough of treacherous sand.
“Now that you’re up,” I said, “I think you should lock the door behind me. And keep all the doors locked till this thing is resolved. Don’t answer the bell unless you can see who rang it.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” Ozzie declared. “My well-padded vital organs are hard to reach with either blade or bullet. And I know a few things about self-defense.”
“He’s dangerous, sir. He might have controlled himself so far, but when he cracks, he’ll be so vicious that he’ll make the evening news from Paris to Japan. I’m scared of him.”
Ozzie dismissed my concern with a wave of his six-fingered hand. “Unlike you, I’ve got a gun. More than one.”
“Start keeping them handy. I’m so sorry to have drawn him here.”
“Nonsense. He was just something stuck to your shoe that you didn’t know was there.”
Each time that I leave this house after a visit, Ozzie hugs me as a
father hugs a beloved son, as neither of us was ever hugged by his father.
And every time, I am surprised that he seems so fragile in spite of his formidable bulk. It’s as if I can feel a shockingly thin Ozzie within the mantles of fat, an Ozzie who is being steadily crushed by the layers that life has troweled upon him.
Standing at the open front door, he said, “Give Stormy a kiss for me.”
“I will.”
“And bring her around to bear witness to my beautiful exploded cow and the villainy it represents.”
“She’ll be appalled. She’ll need wine. We’ll bring a bottle.”
“No need. I have a full cellar.”
I waited on the porch until he closed the door and until I heard the deadbolt being engaged.
As I negotiated the cow-strewn front walk and then rounded the Mustang to the driver’s door, I surveyed the quiet street. Neither Robertson nor his dusty Ford Explorer was to be seen.
In the car, when I switched on the engine, I suddenly expected to be blown up like the Holstein. I was too jumpy.
I followed a twisty route from Jack Flats to St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church in the historical district, giving a tail plenty of opportunities to reveal himself. All the traffic behind me seemed to be innocent of the intent to pursue. Yet I felt watched.
EIGHTEEN
PICO MUNDO IS NOT A SKYSCRAPER TOWN. The recent construction of a five-story apartment building made longtime residents dizzy with an unwanted sense of metropolitan crowding and led to editorials in the Maravilla County Times that used phrases like “high-rise blight,” and worried about a future of “heartless canyons of bleak design, in which people are reduced to the status of drones in a hive, and into which the sun never fully reaches.”
The Mojave sun is not a timid little Boston sun or even a don’t-worry-be-happy Caribbean sun. The Mojave sun is a fierce, aggressive beast that isn’t going to be intimidated by the shadows of five-story apartment buildings.
Counting its tower and the spire that sits atop the tower, St. Bartholomew’s Church is by far the tallest structure in Pico Mundo. Sometimes at twilight, under the barrel-tile roofs, the white stucco walls glow like the panes in a storm lantern.