Animosity Page 15

  “God . . .” Céleste turned her head. It was humiliating. It seemed to him that her role in this whole sick enterprise had always been a humiliating one.

  “This could work.” Leda was suddenly animated, her depression fading. “Yes, this could be done, couldn’t it?”

  He looked at Céleste. “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a lot to do,” he said.

  No one spoke for a moment. He looked at each of them.

  “You know that we’ve got to clean up this place. Every . . . inch of it. It has to be immaculate.”

  Céleste set her glass on the cabinet and crossed her arms over her stomach again. No one spoke as they thought of the massive undertaking.

  “Do either of you,” Céleste asked, her voice taking on a new gravity, “realize what we’re talking about doing?”

  He studied her. “Do you want to call the police? That’s the only other alternative.”

  Her face was unreadable. She threw a look at Leda, hung her head, shook it.

  “Okay, then, we’ve got to talk about this. It has to be methodical . . . it has to be—”

  “What about . . . him?” Leda interrupted. “It’s not that easy, to get rid—”

  “Leda, shut up!” Céleste glared at her, furious.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “The kiln,” Leda blurted. It was almost too quick, almost as if she had been waiting for this moment.

  He and Céleste looked at her, stunned.

  Silence.

  “Let’s talk about how we’re going to clean this up,” he said.

  Chapter 25

  Céleste and Leda picked up everything off the floor between the bed and the door to the bedroom. The rest they could deal with later.

  He had pulled on a pair of yellow rubber dishwashing gloves he’d gotten from the kitchen and was standing by the bed, looking at Lacan. The two sisters were on the other side of the bed. Leda was mesmerized by Lacan’s body, staring at it with a curiosity that he found indecent for reasons he didn’t even understand. Céleste would look at the bed, but not at the body, a reaction he found more understandable, and palatable, than Leda’s unabashed fascination.

  He took a sheet from the linen closet in Céleste’s bathroom and spread it out on the floor beside the bed. Then he unfolded another sheet and laid it on top of that one.

  While Leda and Céleste stood by, he grabbed Lacan’s rubbery body and began wrestling it toward the edge of the bed. It was a process at once repulsive and ridiculous. He got blood all over his clothes, so much that he wondered why he bothered continuing with the gloves. But he did. He didn’t want to inadvertently paw Lacan’s bare flesh.

  When the body finally fell off the bed onto the sheets, the density of its own weight forced gas from its diaphragm, and a grotesque whoosh burst from Lacan’s mouth through the blood-saturated wrapping on his head. They all staggered back from the corpse.

  Céleste spun around and ran into her bathroom and started vomiting.

  “Christ!” He quickly gathered his wits and immediately started wrapping the body in the sheets onto which it had fallen. Leda stood, transfixed, watching him.

  With a good deal of struggling, he managed finally to wrap the body in both sheets. He removed the shoestrings from a pair of shoes in Céleste’s closet and tied the top and bottom of the sheets. Then he took the belt from Lacan’s trousers that had been thrown over a chair and buckled it around the middle of the body to keep the bundle from spreading open.

  Céleste’s vomiting didn’t last long, but she didn’t come out of the bathroom until he had dragged the weird bag out through the bedroom and into the upper hallway.

  When he came back into the room, Céleste had righted one of the overturned chairs and was sitting down. Leda was sitting in a chair near a window on the far side of the room. She was also pale, her fascination gone, as if the adrenaline deficit had suddenly hit her.

  Both women looked at him. He was hot and sweaty.

  “Any more sheets in there?” he asked Céleste.

  She went back into the bathroom and returned with two more folded sheets. As before, he spread both of them on the floor. He pulled everything off the bed, the pillows, the bottom sheet, the pad underneath it, and—to his great relief—the plastic covering underneath the pad. He had been worried about how to dispose of the blood-soaked mattress. Now he didn’t have to.

  He threw everything onto the sheets that was cloth and had blood on it. The old house had polished hardwood floors with area rugs scattered throughout. There were several around Céleste’s bed, and these too went into the pile on the sheets.

  When he had gotten everything he could think of, he tied the four corners of the sheets together and dragged this bundle out into the hallway, too.

  He walked back into the bedroom.

  “Leda, go down the stairs ahead of us and pull all the rugs out of the way. We’re going out the back door.”

  She was still looking weak, but she struggled out of the chair and went out the door without saying a word.

  He looked at Céleste.

  “How’re you doing?”

  “I’m fine. I’ll drag the bundle, right?”

  “Can you?”

  She nodded.

  They went out into the hallway. Grabbing one end of Lacan’s shroud, he pulled, sliding the cocoon easily along on the polished wood. Céleste followed, doing the same thing with the bundle of linen. When he got to the head of the stairs, he went around to the other end of the cocoon and pushed until most of the body was off the top step, and then gravity took over. All he had to do was hold on to regulate the rate of its descent down the two flights of stairs.

  When he reached the bottom and pulled the body away from the last step, he looked back. Céleste was standing at the landing.

  “Just push it off,” he said. “It won’t come untied, and it’s not heavy enough to hurt anything.”

  She did as he said, and the bundle of bloody clothes and sheets and rugs lumbered down the two flights of stairs in efficient silence.

  Leda had shoved all the rugs to one side of the entry hall, and Lacan’s cocoon whispered smoothly over the polished wood to the back door. Here everything became more difficult.

  Céleste pulled the rental car into the garage while he went out the front door and brought the Jeep around and parked it behind the car. Even though the car would have provided more concealment for transporting the body than the Jeep, he would have had to worry about getting blood on the upholstery. He guessed that Lacan’s cocoon was going to start leaking. Even though he seemed to have spilled every drop he had in bed, when Lacan’s heart stopped beating it stopped pumping blood out through his wounds. The odds were that there was still plenty in him to leak out, and the Jeep could easily be hosed down.

  He parked close to the sidewalk that led to the back porch, opened the tailgate, and by the time he came up the steps to the back door, his fear about the blood had already proved true. The end of Lacan’s cocoon that covered his head had become a spreading dark stain that had left behind a streaked smear of rusty red.

  “Shit,” he said, standing over the body.

  Leda looked at him. “What’s the matter?”

  “This polished floor’s going to clean up okay,” he said, “but if we get blood in the split grain of this old porch, you’ll never get it all out. Same for the sidewalk. They’ll find it. I’ll have to carry him out to the Jeep.”

  He knew it was going to be awkward, and he could tell from dragging the body that Lacan was going to be heavy. It would have been easier if he could have dragged him out to the steps of the porch so that he could pick up the body from a lower position, but as he had already decided, that was out of the question.

  It took all of his strength to lift the frustratingly pliant cocoon a little at a time until he could get his right shoulder under the body. The corpse was maddeningly limp, making it difficult to maneuver. But fi
nally he got it over his shoulder and slowly, straining, got to his feet. The body, uneasily balanced, was hell to hold on to, but he managed to adjust the weight as Leda opened the door to the porch.

  The steps off the porch were nearly too much to negotiate, and even though he was used to fairly hard work, the trip to the driveway seemed to take forever, each step a herculean feat. Finally he dropped the body down on the tailgate of the Jeep with a jarring whump. Then, like a wasp dragging a spider to its nest, he wrestled Lacan lengthwise in the Jeep, front to back, between the seats. By the time he finished he was drenched with sweat and covered in more blood than he wanted to think about.

  He sat on the tailgate to catch his breath while Leda and Céleste brought out the bundle of bloody linen and dropped it at his feet. No one spoke. His heart was driving like a piston. The night was hot. Not a single leaf stirred in all of San Rafael.

  “You have to start here,” he said after a moment, still sitting on the tailgate, his voice sounding conspiratorial in the darkness. “He may have dripped some . . . along the way. Check the sidewalk. The porch. Just go over every inch of our path from the bedroom.”

  They said nothing.

  “In the bedroom. Do it this way: Think of the room as a box, six sides. You can forget the ceiling. It’s too high to have mattered. Start at the left wall as you enter the door. Examine it. Clean it. Use a light bleach solution. Move around the room one wall at a time, floor to ceiling until you’ve cleaned all four walls. Then the floor. Same in the bathroom. You have to do it that way, methodically, or it won’t be any good. You’ll miss too much.”

  Silence. He felt a little queasy. Then very queasy. The heat, the strain, all of it. He was getting a headache. He didn’t dare stop to think about what he was doing, about the big picture, that he was disposing of the body of a man who had been murdered. It was too . . . it was beyond bizarre . . . there wasn’t any word for it.

  “The bed frame,” he went on. “Imagine the blood, clean where you imagine it might be. It splattered. Think about that and clean where your imagination takes you. Don’t forget—”

  “Christ, Ross,” Leda snapped, “we’ll do it. We’ll clean the place.”

  He was looking at their silhouettes. That’s all they were to him, talking silhouettes, smudges in the darkness.

  “What are you going to do . . .” Céleste stopped.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Chapter 26

  He threw the bundle of linens on top of Lacan’s cocoon, making sure it covered the bloody end. Then he unwrapped some tools that he kept in a roll of canvas and tossed the canvas on top of the exposed end of the shroud, anchoring it with the tools. The canvas top of the Jeep would provide some visual protection, even though the sides and back were open.

  “That’s it,” he said to the two dark figures on the sidewalk. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  He backed out of the drive and had just started down the slope to the street when he stopped, shifted into low gear again, and went back up the drive to the garage. Leda and Céleste were already at the back steps of the porch. He left the Jeep idling and went into the garage, got the pipe out of the sink, and threw it onto the floor of the Jeep on the passenger’s side. The sisters didn’t say a word as they watched him from the back porch. Again he backed down the drive and out into the street.

  He felt stupid as well as nauseated. He was numb. From within the event, each moment seemed to have its own logic, one small decision led reasonably to the next. But when he backed away from the discrete judgments and thought of them as a whole . . . yes, even as a headline—SCULPTOR ROSS MARTEAU INDICTED IN MURDER SCANDAL—he grew light-headed. The sense that this was really happening began to bleed away, and the weird episode took on an illusional quality.

  On the other hand, it was all too real. He knew that if he were stopped by the police, his life would be over. He had never been stopped by the police in San Rafael, never, not in twenty years, but as he drove down the wooded, winding streets from Palm Heights, he thought that being stopped by them now was almost an inevitability. A pall of resignation settled over him, and then a great sadness that it had to end like this, with the stench of scandal that was not at all typical of his life. It would stain the idea of Ross Marteau, and he would forever be the sculptor of the murder scandal rather than, simply, the sculptor. His work would become a footnote to his life rather than the point of it.

  He was surprised to find himself at the bottom of Santa Elena Drive and rounding the corner at Rambach’s Mill again. Between there and Los Ciprés bridge upstream, the river flowed at its deepest until after it left San Rafael.

  The old mill sat on a small promontory where the Rio Encinal narrowed and the water ran swift as it rushed between two opposing bluffs. Long ago the mill had been turned into a small inn and restaurant, its approach from the drive obscured by a stand of maples.

  In his mind’s eye he had imagined that he could pull into the parking area of the inn and make his way along a path that ran down below the mill and the restaurant. There, out of sight of the diners in the restaurant above, whose view from the windows overlooked the fast water and the town on the hillside across the river, he would toss the pipe into the river.

  Now, as he sat across the road from Rambach’s and looked across at the mill, he felt like an idiot. What was he going to do, leave the body in the Jeep for everyone to see while he went on his errand? And what was he going to do if he encountered someone on the path while he still had the pipe in his hand? It was an inn, for Christ’s sake, and the view from the path was beautiful, and people often strolled there.

  He hadn’t been thinking. Or he hadn’t been thinking straight, which scared the hell out of him. Jesus, he had a corpse crammed down on the floor of the Jeep, its bloody head rubbing against his calf every time he shifted gears and pressed on the accelerator. Rubbing. Rubbing. Rubbing. And he had blood all over him which anyone could see on even a cursory inspection.

  Just get off the damn streets.

  He pulled out onto Riverside and made his way along the serpentine course. He met a few cars, let a pickup pass him. It was his advantage that the few street lamps in San Rafael were old, with low-wattage incandescent lights, and were located only on the busiest main streets. Los Ciprés bridge seemed miles and miles away.

  But finally he was there, crossing the river. He looked downstream toward Rambach’s Mill, the convivial glow of its lanterns painfully innocent and inviting. For the first time he felt alien from all that, from the cozy pleasures of San Rafael that he had taken for granted for so many years now. To his left the cypresses that overshadowed the river upstream loomed like knowing giants, accusatory and darker than the night itself. Underneath them, offering a glittering escape from the nightmare, were the little collection of restaurants and bars that had built up downstream from Graber’s, throwing their colored lights across the water. God, how he wished this were just another night at Graber’s.

  He crossed the river and headed downstream on Buena Vista, hugging the river on its east side now, the pecan trees of the long and narrow Denegre Park separating him from the water. He could see Rambach’s Mill almost straight across from him and behind the mill the sprinkling of dim lights that climbed up the hillsides into Palm Heights . . . Palm Heights and the grisly chores under way at 1722 Santa Elena Boulevard.

  He was sweating profusely, from the heat and the struggle with the body, but mostly from the panicked flush of the thought that he just might make it without being stopped after all. He watched his speedometer. He used his turning signals when he switched lanes, an absurdity on these small, sparsely traveled streets. He was the epitome of responsibility, the soul of driving rectitude. An oddity. And what attracted more attention than an oddity? He quit signaling.

  He turned up into the hills. While he was driving by the river the odors of the water predominated in the warm night, but here the fragrance of cedar q
uickly filled the air, and once again, even over the noise of the Jeep motor, he could hear the throbbing of cicadas and crickets in the darkness. Soon the Jeep’s headlights picked up the front wall to his property and then the opened wrought-iron gates.

  Giddy with relief, he turned into the drive and stopped just inside the gates. Usually he left the gates open, but now he reached into the glove box and pushed the remote control. While the gates slowly swung shut, he hopped out of the Jeep and went to a little roofed box behind one of the stone gate pillars. He took out a chain and padlock and wrapped them around the adjacent rails of the two wings of the gates and locked them with the padlock.

  Driving slowly, he was halfway around the drive when he turned off into the woods onto a barely visible track. His headlights panned across the close brush and illuminated a narrow tunnel of visibility as he meandered his way around the house until his lights picked up the kiln shed and the studio. Quickly cutting the headlights, he shifted into low gear, slowed to a crawl, and eased up to the front of the kiln shed.

  Leaving the Jeep idling, he got out and went to a light pole that anchored the front left corner of the shed. He opened an electrical box and flipped a switch, turning on a low-wattage light that threw a slightly jaundiced glow over a small area at the front of the kiln. He often used the kiln at nights to avoid having to fire it up during the heat of the day and had designed a lighting system to be invisible beyond the walls of his compound.

  Just under the shed, nearly adjacent with the front of the kiln, was a butane tank and a control panel for the kiln. He hadn’t fired the kiln in a year, but he had made sure the butane tank was filled before he returned to San Rafael. Focusing on an analogue dial on a line that led from the tank to the kiln, he hurriedly turned a brass valve handle.