I got investments. Whores don't have investments, honey. Alan wasn't
my pimp. He was my manager. In fact, he managed a couple of my
girlfriends, too. I fixed him up with them because, at first, before he
started getting strange, he was the best."
Dazzled by the woman's self-delusion, Jorja said, "And Alan took a
managerial fee for handling your career-and theirs?"
Her scowl fading, somewhat placated by Jorja's willingness to use
euphemisms, Pepper said, "No. That was one of the best things about our
arrangement with him. He was still a blackjack dealer, see; that's
where he made his money. He had all the contacts needed to manage us,
but all he wanted for his trouble was free trade. I never knew a man
who needed so much pussy. He couldn't get enough. In fact, the last
couple of months, he seemed obsessed with pussy. Was he like that with
you, honey?". Repulsed by this sudden intimacy, Jorja tried to stop the
woman, but Pepper would not be quiet. "In fact, the last few weeks he
was so horny all the time that I started to think maybe I should dump
him. I mean, there was something a little crazy about it. He'd do it
and do it and do it until he just couldn't get his pecker up to do it
any more, and then he'd want to watch X-rated videotapes."
Jorja was suddenly angry that Alan had made her executor, forcing her to
witness the moral squalor in which he had passed the last year of his
life. And she was angry because she would have to find a way to explain
his death to Marcie, who was already treading a psychological tightrope.
But she was not really angry with Pepper Carrafield; not angry but
appalled, yes, because even Alan deserved a little mourning and respect
from his live-in lover, more than this shark could ever give him. But
there was no point in blaming the shark for being a shark.
One of the elevators opened, disgorging uniformed policemen, morgue
employees, and a gurney bearing a corpse in an opaque plastic body bag.
Jorja and Pepper rose from the sofa.
Even as the stretcher was being rolled out of the first elevator, the
doors of the second opened, and four more cops appeared, two in uniform
plus a team of plainclothes detectives. A detective came to Pepper
Carrafield and asked a few final questions.
No one asked any questions of Jorja. She stood rigid and suddenly numb,
staring at the body bag that contained her ex-husband.
They rolled the gurney across the travertine. The wheels squeaked.
Jorja watched it moving away.
Two cops held the lobby doors while the morgue attendants pushed the
gurney outside. It moved past the lobby windows. Jorja turned to
observe its progress. She still felt no grief, but she was swept by a
powerful wave of melancholy, a profound sadness at what might have been.
From the nearest of the elevators, where she was holding a door open,
Pepper said, "Let's go up to my place."
Outside, they closed the doors of the coroner's van.
In the elevator on the way up, and in a discreet whisper in the
fourteenth-floor hallway, then continuing in a normal tone of voice as
they entered her big living room, Pepper insisted on describing Alan's
peculiar sexual hunger. He had always had the carnal appetite of a
gourmand, but apparently sex had become a sick obsession with him as his
life had wound down through its last couple months.
Jorja did not want to hear about it, but stopping the hooker seemed more
difficult than simply enduring her chatter.
In recent weeks, Alan's days had been devoted to erotic pursuits, though
it all sounded feverish and desperate rather than pleasurable. He had
used sick leave and vacation time to spend long-often frantic-hours in
bed with Pepper or others whose "careers" he managed, and there was no
variation or perversion that he failed to explore to excess. The hooker
chattered on: Alan had developed a fascination with lascivious
substances, devices, appliances, and clothing-dildos, penis rings,
spike-heeled shoes, vibrators, cocaine ointment handcuffs. . . .
Jorja, already weak-kneed and dizzy since seeing the body bag, grew
queasy. "Please stop. What's the point? He's dead, for God's sake."
Pepper shrugged. "I thought you'd want to know. He threw away a lot of
his money on this . . . this sex thing. Since you're the executor of
the estate, I thought you'd want to know."
The last will and testament of Alan Arthur Rykoff, which he had left
with Pepper for safekeeping, was a simple preprinted one-page form of
the type obtainable at any business supply store.
Jorja sat on a cobalt-blue Ultrasuede chair beside a lacquered black
Tavola table, quickly scanning the will in the light from a high-tech,
burnished-steel, cone-shaped 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 him-his manner, his look, his state of
mind-that 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 stuff-jewelry, personal things-you 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 self-interest. "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 features-craters, ridges,
plains-clearly 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 problems-obsessive fear in one case,
obsessive attraction in the other-but 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 genitals 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 moon-troubled 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
"These dreams-were 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 self-defense
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 com
ing 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 Christophson-former Ambassador to Great Britain,
former United States Senator, and former Director of the CIA-would 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, white-haired, 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,