Snake Eyes Page 18

  For the next two hours he remained in Lee Roy Sears’s neighborhood, his car parked, inconspicuously as he hoped, a few doors up the street from the rooming house. He passed the time by looking through some of the papers he’d brought home pertaining to the $50 million Peverol suit. (The light from the street was just barely adequate for reading.) And by sipping wine. (On an impulse, he’d bought a bottle of inexpensive, cloyingly sweet Gallo wine at a neighborhood store: the very store at which Lee Roy Sears would probably make his alcoholic purchases, if he was drinking again, which, Michael hoped, he was not. A small matter, but it might constitute violation of parole.)

  Michael could not recall having had lunch that day—he’d worked through midday, frantic to clear his desk before the $50 million Peverol suit swept over him and his staff—but he was not hungry in the slightest. Hadn’t Gina remarked upon that?—no, it had been Marita, the other evening: Michael didn’t seem to have his old appetite lately. He ate without tasting his food. He wasn’t thirsty at the moment either, and he loathed the Gallo wine. Yet, there he sat behind the wheel of the stylish white Mazda, near the shabby intersection of Eighth Street and Graff, Putnam, New Jersey, sipping now and then from the bottle cloaked in its discreet paper bag, and frowning over a swath of legal documents and photocopied material. By the time the Peverol case even came to court, thousands of pages of such material would have passed through Michael O’Meara’s hands. And brain.

  Once, years ago, Michael had happened to overhear two senior Pearce executives speaking of him, in the executive men’s lounge. One had said, “Isn’t Michael O’Meara a godsend?—and he doesn’t seem to know it, or to exploit it!” and the other had said, chuckling, with a paternal fondness, “That’s one of the reasons he is a godsend.”

  Michael, face burning with pleasure, had hidden in a toilet stall until such time as the coast was clear.

  If he’s born too soon.

  They’re what came out.

  Legal work of such painstaking kind is arduous but challenging. You need a zestful commitment. A love of the forest of signs, symbols. Riddles. Reversals. Ironies, and rewards. In equal measure. Oh yes.

  Some temperaments do love the forest, the interior. Daylight too closely resembles oblivion.

  Last Sunday, Lee Roy Sears had come to the O’Mearas for an early supper, so that the boys could join them. Sundays were traditionally early days. A kind of interim; a daylight sort of day; the sabbath. Before the meal, Lee Roy, Joel, and Kenny had gone down to the pond, the three of them trotting, calling out happily, a large wiry black dog and two flaxen-haired pups, while Michael and Gina, more proper adults, sipped their drinks on the terrace. It was a brilliant October day, fading deliciously to dusk. The air was fragrant with dry leaves whose very colors—Chinese-maple red, beech-yellow—seemed discernible, as smells. Michael said, with just the faintest tinge of jealousy, “It’s wonderful, how the boys have grown so fond of Lee Roy, isn’t it?—so trusting.”

  As if her mind were elsewhere, and she had to draw it back, like a recalcitrant net, Gina said, “—oh yes. I think so.”

  “You ‘think’ so—?”

  “It’s just that they’re so sort of—excitable, after they’ve been with him. And secretive. Marita feels it the most because, I guess, they can be, sometimes, a bit—I don’t know—rude with her. I’ve noticed it too, how they talk to each other in code words, the way they used to do when they were little—remember? They fall into these fits of giggling, and then, if I ask them what’s funny, tell Mommy so she can laugh too, they just go blank.” She paused, sipping her drink. Gina O’Meara’s drink was invariably cool dry white wine. “I feel like an intruder in their private lives and I suppose I am.”

  Michael said, surprised, touched, “Why, Gina, you can’t be an intruder in our sons’ lives—you’re their mother.”

  Gina laughed, lightly. Saying, “And you’re their father.”

  Michael went down to the pond, to join Lee Roy Sears and his sons. He felt, in that instant, he could not bear to look at Gina, and he did not know why.

  In the waning sepia light, the pond looked beautiful. The backdrop of trees was beautiful. How happy I’ve been, Michael O’Meara thought. For I own this.

  As always, the pond, close up, looked much larger than it appeared to be from the house. Now that it had been thoroughly dredged, the choking vegetation torn out by its roots, the black sediment at the pond’s bottom hauled away, the pond was flatter, more placid, more mirrorlike than before. Lee Roy Sears, self-conscious in his host’s presence, said, mumbling, “The pond looks real nice now, Mr. O’Meara—I mean Michael. I mean, y’know, now you had it dug out—real nice.”

  Michael said, “Yes? Do you think so?”

  Lee Roy Sears was gripping one hand in another, unconsciously flexing his biceps. He wore a cheap dark garbardine jacket and a long-sleeved white shirt and a pebble-colored necktie. He glanced at Michael, with his strained grin. Elsewhere, the twins were frisking about, squealing, shouting, pushing at each other. Showing off for Lee Roy Sears; maybe for Daddy as well. They saw Daddy infrequently these days.

  Michael said, “I preferred it as it was. Rushes, water iris, cattails. Now it’s too manicured. It’s suburban.”

  Lee Roy said, “It’s deeper.”

  It was then that Joel, or was it Kenny, slipped into the pond, or had he been shoved by his brother: shrieking, splashing, flailing about in the foot-deep water at shore. Michael hurried over with as much urgency as if the water were much deeper, and his little boy was drowning.

  “Daddy, he pushed me!” cried the enraged child, scrambling to his feet in the pond, and, “Daddy, he pushed me!—and fell, himself!” cried the other, indignant, though unable to resist a grin, and, “Daddy, don’t listen to him, he’s a liar!” and, “Daddy, don’t listen to him, he’s a liar!”

  Michael helped Kenny, or was it Joel, out of the water, even as the incensed child wrenched his arm out of Daddy’s grasp. He was half-sobbing—he’d been embarrassed in front of Mr. Sears.

  “Daddy, you saw!—saw what he did!”

  “Daddy, I did not! He did it to himself!”

  “I did not, liar, I did not, liar!”

  “You’re the liar—”

  “—fucking liar!”

  The boys punched and slapped at each other, around Daddy: Daddy, laughing angrily, for he too was embarrassed in front of their guest, held them apart with sheer force. How wild Joel and Kenny could be, at such times!—as Gina had observed, it was as if they regressed to the age of two or three. And how strong they’d grown, in the past few months! Their little bodies sheer energy, muscle. And such obstinacy, such determination.

  Daddy was profoundly shocked that the boys knew, let alone uttered, a word like fucking, but he thought it wisest, in the exigency of the moment (with Gina staring down at them, unmoving on the terrace as if frozen in place), not to say anything. And maybe Lee Roy Sears had not heard.

  When Michael O’Meara woke with a start behind the wheel of his car, he was so disoriented initially he didn’t know where he was.

  The time was 9:02 P.M. He seemed to be parked on the street in a shabby urban neighborhood wholly unknown to him.

  A police patrol car was idling up the block: shouts were being exchanged between policemen in the car and several men standing on the sidewalk. It was the shouting that had wakened Michael.

  The bottle of Gallo wine in its paper bag had nearly capsized. Fortunately it hadn’t spilled on his trousers. There was an ugly stain, however, on a cuff of his suit coat, which he’d tried without success to rub off.

  Seeing the stain, Michael remembered where he was, and why.

  “I’m waiting for him.”

  He must have dozed off, for a few minutes. (In fact, it had been nearly an hour.) The swath of legal papers had slipped from his grasp and were spread on the seat beside him, and on the floor.

  Just down the block was Lee Roy Sears’s rooming house: its yellow brick façade looked a
s if it had been dusted in soot. An obese black man was sitting on the front stoop, fanning himself with a rolled-up newspaper.

  Michael wondered, had Lee Roy returned? He dreaded going back into that terrible place, climbing the stairs again, again knocking on the door. This time, the Hispanic man in the undershirt might be violent.

  Michael rubbed his neck, which ached from his nap, and regarded himself in the rearview mirror. He had not shaved since before seven that morning and his silvery red-brown beard had begun to push through, like shot in his skin. He felt mildly nauseated from the sickish-sweet wine and could not imagine why on earth he’d bought it.

  What an inappropriate neighborhood this was, for a parolees’ halfway house! It was more populous now than earlier: there were rowdy jive-talking young blacks hanging out in front of a tavern poolhall, young Hispanics milling about, women and girls in amazing costumes—skin-tight leather skirts to mid-thigh, knee-high plastic boots, sequined or fishnet sweaters that virtually revealed their breasts. Derelicts weaved about on the sidewalks or lay huddled in doorways like piles of old clothes.

  A second Putnam Police Department patrol car cruised by, and the driver shot Michael a suspicious, appraising look.

  He knew he should go home, it was late, and Gina would be worried about him, if Gina was home. But of course Gina was home.

  He was about to start the ignition when he saw, in the rearview mirror, a familiar car drive up behind him, to park about two car lengths away. Whose car it was, why even the license plate looked familiar, he could not say, at first.

  He was instinctively hunched a little, head lowered. Watching in the mirror as a woman got out from behind the wheel of the trim little Volvo, and, with some effort, as if he were ill or very tired, or drunk, a man got out from the other side. A man with Indian-black hair, a pasty face—Lee Roy Sears.

  Who was the woman?—Michael couldn’t see clearly. She was speaking with Lee Roy Sears earnestly, as if giving advice. A well-dressed youngish woman, not plump, but solid-bodied; with a high, healthy color; shining wheat-colored hair. A woman in her mid-thirties who resembled his sister, Janet.

  The woman and Sears were walking to Sears’s rooming house, Sears unsteady on his feet, and the woman helping to support him. They were of a height but seemed an ill-matched couple. As they approached the building, the black man sitting on the stoop gazed up at them, and the lower half of his face was split by a grin.

  Michael O’Meara stared, appalled: it was Janet.

  He turned just as the couple was entering the building, their faces obscured.

  Michael drove back to Mount Orion. He had no wish to wait, to see when Janet would emerge from the house she had so freely entered.

  VI

  1

  Swiftly she is walking along the upstairs corridor of this semi-public place, heels rapping smartly on the polished oak floorboards like a Spanish dancer’s, when the arm reaches out, without warning, to encircle her waist.

  What place is this, and which evening?—one of Mount Orion’s “historic” renovated mansions, a damp blowsy October night, smelling of wet leaves.

  Why does autumn, gusty autumn, swirling leaves and wind hammering at the windows, make her want to make love?—just the idea of it, that is. Not really.

  The arm claims her. An arm in a dark sleeve, impeccably tailored tux, dazzling white shirtfront with golden studs. No, don’t touch! I said don’t!

  Below, the sound of voices, laughter. Happy sounds. Gay festive mildly intoxicated sounds. The party she has been going to all her life.

  Even a string quartet, off in a corner, to which no one is listening.

  She is struggling with him, the bastard, following her upstairs like this, or—had he been waiting for her?

  She doesn’t want to think he’s been waiting for her. Upstairs, knowing she’d get restless and follow. Knowing her? Does he?

  Damn you I said don’t! you don’t know me you don’t have a clue to me how dare you?

  She isn’t drunk either. Don’t think it, you son of a bitch.

  Taking advantage. But it won’t work!

  She is one of those persons who drinks prudently, carefully, gauging ounces. Measuring ounces against a party’s duration.

  Her drink is the very best white wine: cool, dry, tart, exquisite. And champagne, of course. If it’s very good champagne.

  Which she has been drinking tonight—moderately.

  It’s a celebration, is it?—the inaugural reception of whatever this is, fall-winter. Which year?

  Before she’d actually seen, and felt, the arm snaking out to encircle her slender waist, before she’d felt his hard hungry teeth against her mouth, her throat, her breast, she had maybe, just maybe had a premonition—the way you do when there is something at the periphery of your vision you can’t exactly see.

  So, she might have paused and turned back; might have hurried back down the elegant old circular staircase. Poised, very beautiful. Mysterious smile on her lips.

  So, her husband might not have vaguely, perhaps not at all consciously, sensed her absence. Glancing about, in the midst of talk, smiles, handshakes, hearty greetings.

  Descending the staircase she would have been confident that the black jersey sheath snugly fitting her almost-too-thin body is a success, worth its cost. Ah, she’d known at once, seeing it there on its plush cushioned hanger, in The After Five Salon, Henri Bendel’s. Some things, you simply know.

  The shoes, she hadn’t had such luck. Shopped for days before locating them at Milady’s—but they are exquisite.

  They are stumbling together in a clumsy dance, quick urgent breaths, widened eyes, and, God damn him, he’s stepping on her toes: which means her new shoes: son of a bitch this isn’t funny, will you please stop!

  Kisses tasting of champagne.

  Faint undertaste of oysters, parsley butter. Garlic?

  Laughing he walks her into one of the exhibit rooms, walks her backward, sideways, unceremoniously, nudges the door only partway shut with his elbow.

  Why should I stop? Hmmmm?

  Not here, not now—

  Then where, when?

  —what if someone comes in—

  —hmmmm?

  —oh! you’re crazy, you’re—

  —like this!—

  —I said stop—

  —why, when you like it so?

  Hiking her dress rudely above her knees, above her thighs, up to her waist, and the black silk slip with the lace hem, yes and he’s tugging down her black silk panties, his fingers hard, hot, thrusting so she’s astonished she’s clutching at him desperate to keep from falling, damn you you crazy bastard, laughing he nuzzles her, I’ll take you where you didn’t know you wanted to go just hang on honey, like this? like this? this? unzipping his trousers in this shadowy place smelling of dust and furniture polish, lifting to position her recklessly across one of the glass display cases, thank God it’s a sturdy piece of furniture, where are they?—in an exhibit room solemn as a tomb housing Northern New Jersey history, aged diaries, frayed ladies’ fans, snuffboxes, derby hats, yellowed newspapers with banner headlines at which no one has glanced with more than cursory interest in one hundred years, on the faded-wallpaper walls are portraits in massive gilt frames of stiffly posed gentlemen, bewigged, bewhiskered, a beet-faced general in full regalia lording it over the others from his vantage point above the fireplace mantel. Oh! she is struggling to keep her knees together, the muscles of her groin are clenched tight, her jaws clenched tight, she happens to be wearing a black satin garter belt from Edith’s (when did such fetching female paraphernalia come back into style?—and why?), gossamer-sheer smoke-colored stockings, there are hot furious tears beneath her eyelids she is digging her manicured nails into his wrist she is protesting she is serious she is helpless forced atop the glass display case his weight pinning her, her head thrown back her lovely mouth contorted as a fish’s gasping for air Oh! I said stop! please I mean stop

  —Too late.

>   2

  That autumn. That winter.

  Something unknown and monstrous was happening, and Michael O’Meara could not control it, nor even gauge its dimensions; even as, in nightmare logic, he felt himself somehow responsible.

  Yet, how?—how was he responsible? For these deaths were like accidents, unrelated to him as, apparently, to each other:

  Early in the morning of November 3, Mal Bishop died in a blaze that gutted the tenement in which he rented a single-room apartment, in Newark, the consequence, it was believed, of his having dropped a lighted cigarette in his bed; and.

  In the afternoon of November 16, on the eve of her eighty-fifth birthday, Julia Sutter was discovered dead, having been viciously beaten and stabbed by an intruder, in the basement of the lovely old colonial on Linwood Avenue, Mount Orion, in which she’d lived alone for many years.

  Mal Bishop’s death passed virtually without notice in Mount Orion, but Julia Sutter’s death, which had been murder, profoundly shocked the community. Not only was Julia Sutter a prominent, much-revered figure in Mount Orion, a woman with literally hundreds of friends, acquaintances, and associates, but, yet more significantly, there had been no violent death in Mount Orion in many years. The Mount Orion Courier, a weekly, prepared a special edition devoted to Julia Sutter: the police case, a lengthy obituary, reminiscences and comments by friends and neighbors, photographs of the dead woman and snippets of her poetry. (Julia Sutter had been a woman of many talents, it was revealed.)

  There were only two senior detectives in the Mount Orion Police Department, and both were assigned to the Sutter case: the motive for the killing, if not for its viciousness, was believed to be robbery, since there were a number of valuable household items missing, and Julia’s wallet, emptied of cash and credit cards, was found in an alley a few miles away. And there was at least one immediate suspect—of whom police were unwilling to speak at first, save to say of him, tersely, cryptically, that he was not a resident of Mount Orion.

  Of course, Michael O’Meara thought of Lee Roy Sears at once.