Festival of Fear (11 page)

Two police officers came over to us. One of them shouted out, ‘Anybody here witness this accident? If you did, I want to hear from you.'

I was interviewed twice by two highly disinterested detectives from the Highway Patrol, one of whom should have had a master's degree in nose picking, but after the second visit I received a phone call from my attorney telling me that there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution. Nobody had clearly witnessed what had happened, not even Jack, and the truck driver had been estimated to have been traveling at nearly forty miles an hour in his attempt to beat the traffic signals.

I wrote Jack a letter of condolence, but I think I did it more for my benefit than for his, and I never sent it. Kylie's casket was flown back to Australia, to be interred at the church in Upper Kedron, near Brisbane, where she had been confirmed at the age of thirteen.

Occasionally, friends of mine would tell me that they had run across Jack at medical conventions, or in bars. They all seemed to give me a similar story, that he was ‘more distant than he used to be, quieter, like he has his mind on something, but he's pretty much OK.'

Then – in the first week of October – I saw Jack for myself. I was driving home late in the evening down Coldwater Canyon Drive, after attending a bar mitzvah at my friend Jacob Perlman's house in Sherman Oaks. As I came around that wide right-hand bend just before Hidden Valley Road, I saw a jogger running along the road in front of me. My headlights caught the reflectors on his shoes, first of all, and it was just as well that he was wearing them, because his track suit was totally black.

I give him a double-
bip
on my horn to warn him that I was behind him, and I gave him a very wide berth as I drove around him. I wasn't drunk, but I was drunk-ish, and I didn't want to end up with a jogger as a hood ornament.

As I passed him, however, I saw that he wasn't running alone. Six or seven yards ahead of him was a Great Dane, loping at an easy, relaxed pace. I suddenly realized that the Great Dane had to be Sheba, and that the jogger had to be Jack. He lived only about a half-mile away, after all, on Gloaming Drive.

I pulled into the side of the road, and slid to a stop. Maybe I would have kept on going, if I had been sober. But Jack and I had been the Two Musketeers, once upon a time, both for one and one for both, and don't think I hadn't been eaten up by guilt for what I had done to Kylie.

I climbed down from the Jeep and lifted both arms in the air.

‘Jack!' I shouted. ‘Is that you, Jack? It's me, Bob!'

The jogger immediately ran forward a little way and seized the Great Dane's collar. I still wasn't entirely sure that it
was
Jack, because he and the dog were illuminated only by my nearside tail-light, the offside tail-light having been busted earlier that evening by some overenthusiastic backing-up maneuvers.

‘Jack – all I want to do is
talk
to you, man! I need to tell you how sorry I am!
Jack
!'

But Jack (if it was Jack) didn't say a word. Instead, he scrambled down the side of the road, his shoes sliding in the dust, and the Great Dane scrambled after him. They pushed their way through some bushes, and then they were gone.

I could hear them crashing through the undergrowth for a while, but then there was nothing but me and the soft evening wind fluffing in my ears.

‘That had to be Jack,' I told myself, as I walked back to my Jeep. ‘That had to be Jack and I have to make amends.'

I didn't really care about making amends, to tell you the truth, but I did care about absolution. Like Oscar Wilde said, each man kills the thing he loves, and I may not have done it with a bitter look or a kiss or a flattering word, but I had done it out of jealousy, and maybe that was worse. I needed somebody to forgive me. I needed Jack to forgive me. Most of all, I needed
me
to forgive me.

I took the next left into Gloaming Drive, and drove slowly down it until I came to Jack's house. It was a single-story building, but it was built on several different levels, with glass walls and a wide veranda at the back, with a view over the city. At the front, it was partially shielded from the road by a large yew hedge, and I parked on the opposite side of the street at such an angle that – when he returned from his jog – Jack wouldn't easily be able to see me.

I waited over twenty minutes. Two or three times, I nearly dozed off, and I was beginning to sober up and think that this was a very bad idea, when Jack suddenly appeared in his black track suit, jogging down the road toward me. Sheba was close behind him, running very close to heel.

Jack ran up the front steps of his house, and still jogging on the spot, took out his keys and opened the front door. He and Sheba disappeared inside.

There was a short pause, and then the lights went on.

OK, I thought. What do I do now? Ring the doorbell and say that I want to apologize for killing Kylie? Ring the doorbell and say, here I am, you know you want to hit me, so hit me? Ring the doorbell and burst into tears?

I thought the best thing to do would be to let Jack wind down from his run, give him time to take a shower and pour himself a drink. Maybe he'd be more receptive, when he was relaxed. So I waited another fifteen minutes, even though my muscles were beginning to creak.

Eventually, I eased myself out of the Jeep and closed the door as quietly as I could. I crossed the street until I reached the yew hedge. Looking through the branches, I could see Jack standing in his living room, wearing a tobacco-brown bathrobe, with a cream towel wound around his neck. He was holding what looked like a tumbler of whiskey and he was talking to somebody.

No, this wasn't the right time to ask him for forgiveness, not if he had company. I waited for a while longer and then I skirted my way around to the other side of the yew hedge, to see if I could make out who he was talking to, but I couldn't.

I looked around, to make sure that no nosy neighbors were watching me, and then I quickly crossed the lawn in front of the house and went down the side passage, where the trash bins were stored. It was completely dark here, and I was able to climb up on top of one of the bins, and heave myself over the wooden fence into the back yard.

There were cedar-wood steps leading down from the veranda into the yard. I mounted them cautiously, keeping my head low, until I could peer over the decking into the softly lit living room.

Jack was pacing up and down in front of a large brown leather couch. A woman was sitting in the couch, a blonde, although I couldn't see her face. Her hair was feathery, rather like Kylie's, but it was longer than Kylie's used to be.

The sliding door to the veranda was a few inches ajar. I couldn't distinctly hear what Jack and the blonde were saying to each other, but I stayed on those steps for almost twenty minutes, watching Jack talking and drinking and stalking up and down. He appeared to be angry about something, and frustrated. Maybe he was angry because he had seen me, and frustrated that the law had never punished me for causing Kylie's death.

At one point, however, the blonde woman said something to him, and he stopped, and lowered his head, and nodded, as if he accepted that she was right. He approached the couch and kissed her, and tenderly stroked her hair with the back of his knuckles. If the look in his eyes wasn't the look of love, it was certainly the look of like-you-very-much.

He was halfway through pouring himself a second whiskey when his phone warbled. He picked it up, and paced out of sight, but when he came back he said something to the blonde woman and screwed the top back on the whiskey bottle. Then he disappeared.

I waited, and waited. After about ten minutes Jack reappeared, and now he was dressed in a pale blue shirt and black chinos. He gave the blonde woman another kiss, and then he walked out again. I heard an SUV start up, around the front of the house, and back out of the driveway, and turn northward up Gloaming Drive.

I didn't really know what to do next. The only sensible alternative was to go back home, and try to talk to Jack some other time, although I seriously doubted that he would ever agree to it. I crept crabwise back down the steps, and groped my way back along the side of the house, in the shadows.

But then I thought: what I need here is an intermediary, a go-between, somebody who can speak to Jack on my behalf, and explain how remorseful I feel. And who better to do that than somebody he's obviously very fond of? Who better, in fact, than the blonde woman on the couch?

Women understand about guilt, I reasoned. Women understand about remorse. If I could convince this woman that I was genuinely sorry for what I had done to Kylie, maybe she could persuade Jack to forgive me.

I climbed quietly back up the steps again. I didn't want to startle her, especially since she might well have had a gun, and I was technically trespassing. I didn't know how fierce Sheba could be, either, if she thought that I was an unwelcome intruder (which, to be honest, I was).

The living room was already in darkness, although the hallway and several other rooms were still lit. I could hear samba music, and water running.

I crossed the veranda and went up to the sliding door. I hesitated, and then I called out, ‘Excuse me! Is anybody home?'

This is crazy, I thought. I
know
there's somebody home.

‘Excuse me!' I called out, much louder this time. ‘This is Bob, I'm an old friend of Jack's!'

Still no answer. I waited and waited, and below me the lights of Los Angeles sparkled and shimmered like the campfires of a vast barbarian army.

I should have gone back down those steps and gone home and forgotten that I had ever seen Jack again. Sometimes we do things for which there is no possible forgiveness, and all we can do is go on living the best way we can.

But I slid the veranda door a little wider, and stepped inside the living room. It was chilly in there, severely air conditioned, and it smelled of dried spices, cinnamon and cloves. I crossed to the center of the room. On the wall there was a strange painting of a pale blue lake, with ritual figures all around it.

I heard the woman singing in one of the bedrooms. ‘
She walks with a sway when she walks . . . she talks like a witch-lady talks
.' She sounded throaty, to say the least.

‘Hallo?' I called, although I was aware that my voice was still too weak for her to hear me. ‘This is Bob, I'm a friend of Jack's!'

I heard the clickety-clacking of Sheba's claws on the hardwood floor. I prayed that the next thing I heard wouldn't be ‘
kill
!'

I glanced down at the brown leather couch where the blonde woman had been sitting. Six or seven scatter cushions were strewn across it, with bright red-and-yellow covers, and fringes. On one of the cushions lay a ski mask, in a brindled mixture of black and brown wool. I picked it up and stared into its empty eye-sockets. There was something about it which really gave me the willies, as if it was a voodoo mask.

‘
Put it down
,' said a harsh woman's voice.

‘Hey – I'm sorry,' I said, lowering the ski mask, and turning toward the hallway. ‘I was just—' It was then that I literally sank to my knees in shock.

It was Sheba, the Great Dane. But Sheba didn't have Sheba's head any more. Sheba had Kylie's head.

She walked toward me and stood in front of me. There was no question about it, it was Kylie. Her face was haggard, with puffed-up lips, and her jaw looked lumpy, as if it had been smashed and rebuilt. But those Hershey-brown eyes were still the same.

‘Jesus,' I said. ‘Jesus, I'm having a nightmare.'

‘You think
you're
having a nightmare?' she croaked.

I struggled to my feet and sat on the couch. Kylie/Sheba stayed where she was, staring at me.

‘Christ, Kylie. This is unreal.'

‘I wish it was, Bob. But it isn't. How did you get in here?'

‘I – just climbed over the fence. What
happened
to you, for Christ's sake?'

‘I died, Bob. But I was brought back to life.'

‘Like this? This is insane! Was it Jack? Did Jack do this to you?'

Kylie closed her eyes to indicate ‘yes.'

‘But how could he do it? I mean,
why
?'

Her voice was very strained, but she hadn't lost her Australian accent. ‘Jack says that he was so much in love with me, he couldn't bear to lose me. That crash – my entire body was crushed. Legs, pelvis, ribcage, spine. I wouldn't have survived for more than two or three days. So that was when Jack decided to sacrifice Sheba, in order to save me.'

‘But how did he get away with it? Doing an operation like that – it must be totally illegal.'

‘Jack has his own clinic, remember, and three highly-qualified surgeons. He persuaded them that they would be making medical history. And he paid them all a great deal of money.'

‘But how about you? Didn't
you
have any say?'

‘I was unconscious, Bob. I didn't know anything about it, until I woke up.'

I have never fainted, ever – not even when my cousin Freddie ripped off three of his fingers with a circular saw. But right then I could feel the blood emptying out of my brain and I was pretty darn close to it. The whole world turned black and white, like a photographic negative, and I felt like I was perspiring ice-water.

‘What do you feel about it now?' I asked her. ‘How can you manage to
live
like this?'

She gave me a sad, bruised smile. ‘I try to treat myself with respect, and I try to treat Sheba with respect. That's why I go out running, to give her body the exercise she needs. We always go out at night, and I always wear that ski mask, so that nobody can see my face and my hair.'

‘But you can
talk
. Dogs can't talk.'

‘Jack transplanted my vocal chords. I still get breathless, but I don't find talking too difficult.'