Prayer for the Dead (19 page)

He was saying something, but Helen could not hear it over the pounding of blood in her ears, the strangled sounds entrapped in the back of her throat.

“Calm down, Helen,” Dyce said. “I don’t want to hurt you, I just want you to be quiet.”

He eased the pressure on her throat and Helen gasped, then sucked greedily for air through her nose.

“Just hold still,” he said. He held his finger to his lips, shushing her. “Everything’s all right, you’re all right. I just wanted to keep you from yelling. You understand that, don’t you? Of course you do. You understand. There now, there now, just calm down. I’m going to remove the pillow, all right? I’m going to let you talk, but you mustn’t raise your voice, do you understand? Of course you do, of course you do. There now, calm down, Helen. That’s a girl, that’s a good girl.”

He smiled at her; his voice was oddly soothing and Helen felt herself relaxing. Again shushing her, he removed the pillow from her mouth, but held it close to her face. His eyebrows arched up in question, waiting for her reaction.

Helen wanted to speak but could only cough at first.

“I hope I didn’t scare you,” he said. “You know I’d never hurt you, Helen.”

She wanted to tell him that he was hurting her now, sitting on her chest, but something in his face told her he would do much worse if she complained.

“Are we all right now?” he asked. “Are we settled down? No need to talk yet. Just nod. That’s right, we’re fine. Now when you do talk, I want you to do it quietly, and when I tell you to do something, I want you to do it immediately and without question. Do you understand? Just nod. Good, Helen.”

Dyce leaned his weight back slightly and eased the pressure of his knees on her arms.

“Now tell me, why are there policemen at my house? Why was that man just here? I know that man. He knows me. Why was he visiting you, Helen?”

Dyce looked at her calmly, quizzically, a slight smile of encouragement on his lips. Helen stared at the blood stains on his shirt, trying to think what to say.

“I don’t know,” she said at last.

Dyce looked at her sadly. “That’s no good, Helen. That’s not a good answer. Do you know why?”

Helen shook her head no.

“Because it assumes I’m an idiot.” He smiled broadly, as if appreciating the joke. “We both know I’m not an idiot, don’t we?”

Helen nodded agreement.

Dyce moved his hand and Helen winced, but he reached past her and switched on the lamp on her night table.

“Now, I want to try this again. I’ll ask you why the police are at my house, and you’ll tell me the truth this time, all right? But I want you to think about something else first.”

Dyce unscrewed the shade from the lamp and dropped it onto the floor. He held the naked bulb next to her cheek. She could feel the heat. From several inches it was no more than a comforting warmth.

“Have you ever burned your fingers on a light bulb? Of course you have. Do you remember how much that hurt? And that was when you could pull your fingers away immediately. Now suppose you couldn’t pull away and that pain just grew and grew and spread all over your face. Just think about that for a moment, Helen, and then tell me what’s going on.”

Dyce moved the lighted bulb closer to her face.

“Shhh. Not yet. Just think about this first.”

He moved the bulb closer still. She could hear a faint humming sound from the electrical element in the bulb.

When she began to tremble and tears welled in her eyes, Dyce spoke again in the same soothing tone.

“Tell me now, Helen. We’ll start with the police. Why are they at my house?”

After she told him everything she knew, he led her to the kitchen and selected her best knife. Dyce was disappointed in the selection.

“A good knife is an absolute essential for a good cook,” he said. He had placed her on a stool in the corner of the kitchen so she could not leave without passing him. As he rummaged through the knife drawer, Helen glanced out the window. If necessary she would throw the stool through the window to get attention, but there was nobody out there.

“What do you cut things with, for heaven’s sake? Do you do all your work with a paring knife?” He held one up contemptuously, then tossed it back in the drawer. “You couldn’t bone a chicken with that,” he said.

He settled at last on an old and long-neglected carving knife with a handle formed of antler. The blade was dull and specked with corrosion.

“You don’t even have a proper whetstone,” he complained.

“Please,” said Helen in a voice so low she could barely hear it herself.

“This is not the way to live. You’ve got to have more pride in yourself This lack of self-esteem …” He waved his arm to encompass the whole room. “Well, it’s pretty sadly reflected in this kitchen.”

“Please, don’t,” she said, louder this time.

Dyce was sharpening the knife on an emery wheel that was part of the electric can opener, shaking his head at the neglect of good steel. The grinding drowned Helen’s voice.

“If you ever lived on a farm you’d learn something about keeping your tools in good shape,” he said, testing the knife edge with his thumb.

“I’ll do anything, anything,” Helen said.

“Get me a paper towel,” he said. He put the can opener back in its place, handling it with some difficulty because of his injured arm.

She looked at him, not comprehending.

“A paper towel, Helen.”

She tore one from the roll and held it toward him. With startling suddenness and violence, Dyce slashed at it with the knife. The lower half of the towel drifted to the floor.

“Now that’s good steel,” he said.

Helen held both hands over her face, and the upper half of the paper towel protruded as if she were a toddler grasping her favorite blanket.

“Please,
what?”
he asked, annoyed.

“Don’t kill me.”

He seemed genuinely surprised. “I’m not going to kill you, Helen. Why on earth would I do that? I thought we’d take a ride to Bridgeport together.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re going to take your car and because I would have trouble driving with my arm like this.”

Helen nodded, understanding nothing.

“And Bridgeport because I understand there are people there who can provide me with documents. It’s awfully hard to get by in America without documents. Bridgeport has neighborhoods where people are not very particular. Do you see?”

Helen nodded again. “I see.”

“Shall we go?”

Helen moved slowly past him until he caught her arm. He held it gently, almost courtly as they walked onto the street. He did not explain the knife and Helen did not ask. She knew she would not like the answer.

He sat with the knife resting on the front seat by his left hand while she drove. Whenever they slowed down for traffic, he grasped the knife and held it close to her ribs, though when he spoke there was nothing in his voice to indicate the slightest concern, or, indeed, any change in their relationship. If anything, he was more talkative and friendlier than he had been before Helen discovered the skulls under his floorboards.

When they reached the thruway and headed toward Bridgeport, Dyce fell silent for a long while. Helen tried to think of nothing but the traffic and after a time the flow of the road lulled her into a form of forgetfulness. When he spoke again he startled her.

“You mustn’t be afraid of me,” he said. “You must obey me, but don’t be afraid.”

“All right,” said Helen, trying to control her breathing, which had started out of control at the sound of his voice.

“I didn’t put those bones under the floor,” he said, as if an afterthought. “You know that, don’t you?”

Helen swallowed. She did not know how to speak to him.

“I didn’t know,” she said.

“Oh, no,” he said. A huge transport truck roared past them on the left, causing their car to shudder in its wake. “Someone else did that. The previous owner, probably.”

He glanced at Helen to see how the statement was taken. She nodded, fighting back tears. He returned to his study of the traffic in front of them. Dyce regarded the role of passenger as one of codriver.

“What did he say when you told him about the talcum powder?” Dyce asked. “I wonder what he thinks of me.”

He turned to face her on the seat, like a girlfriend settling in for a cozy chat.

“Did he think that was strange?”

Chapter 11

“
I
always knew there was something wrong with
Dyce,” Chaney said with considerable pride.

“What did you think was wrong with him?”

“An excess of ordinary. There’s such a thing as too common, you know. Or maybe you don’t know; you’re not an actuary. That’s one thing we look for, something that occurs too often. You might think that if sixty-three percent of the workers in a certain industry retire at age sixty-five, the national average, and die at the age of seventy-five point seven years of heart failure, also the national average, then that sets your average for that industry, but me, I look at that and say, hold it, what’s going on here, that’s way
too
average. Who are these people, clones? You see what I mean?”

“No,” said Becker who understood but wanted to encourage the man to speak.

Chaney took an impatient breath. Laymen were slow, no two ways about it. He was leading Becker down a lengthy corridor toward the actuary pool.

“People are different,” said Chaney. “We aren’t Paramecium, we aren’t lab mice or fruit flies all grown from the same egg fertilized in a petri dish. We have to expect the random in all of us. An average is just what you get when you cut off the heads of the tallest and put the shortest on stools. It’s an
arithmetic
construct. You follow? No one is really average. Just as no one could really be as bland as Dyce seemed to be. No matter how vanilla pudding he was on the outside, I knew there had to be something going on inside, some quirk to make him human. What did he do, exactly?”

Becker looked down on Chaney’s shaven head. The stubble on the sides of his skull where he still had hair was growing dark. A five-o’clock-shadow on the head, Becker thought. The ridge atop the skull was pronounced, almost pointed.

“This is just a routine investigation, for background purposes primarily.”

“Sure,” said Chaney. “That’s why the boss is all over himself to get me to cooperate. Come on, you can tell me. What did the little bastard do?”

“We’re not sure he did anything,” said Becker. “That’s why we’re investigating.”

Chaney tilted his head and gave Becker a knowing smirk as they paused outside the actuarial office. Becker wondered if everyone else had the same urge to rap the man’s parietal bone with his knuckles.

“He hated me, of course,” said Chaney. “Might as well get that on the record in case he talks about me.”

“Why is that?”

“Jealousy. You probably don’t know this, but actuaries are actually a pretty unorthodox bunch. We’re the artists of the insurance business, you might say. Perhaps you didn’t know that, if you get your information from herd movies and the like, but we’re all rebels.”

“I’d heard that about actuaries.”

“You’re joking, of course, officer, but it’s true. Insurance people as a whole are not very colorful; that’s a demand of the business. People want to think they’re being insured by someone as sober and conservative as a U.S. President. Not overly bright, but foursquare, you know? But actuaries are a different breed.”

He plucked at the gray cardigan sweater he wore. It looked to Becker as if it had earned its grayness from incessant wear, but Chaney was clearly proud of it. It was an emblem of his independence.

“You don’t see executives in any other department out of suit and tie.”

“And this is why Dyce was jealous of you?”

“Not the sweater, the attitude. A little dash, a little style. He
always
wore a suit and tie. He was senior to me, you know. Oh, yeah. I went right over his head and he hated me for it, I’m sure. Not that he ever let on. He never let on to
anything.”

Chaney pushed open the door as if it were the gates of a castle.

“Here’s the guts of the industry,” he said. “Or a better analogy would be the brains. Without us, the insurance industry would be working blind.”

“That would make you the eyes,” said Becker, but Chaney appeared not to hear.

The actuarial pool was a large room crowded with people at computer screens. Accordion piles of computer printouts sat by each desk, and everyone seemed to be either reading the printouts or tapping buttons on the consoles. At first glance there was nothing to distinguish it from the work warrens of many other industries, nor anything to verify Chaney’s claim of a wild and crazy breed of workers. Becker noted that it appeared to be a singularly male calling. There were only three women among the more than thirty employees.

“Dyce worked here,” said Chaney, switching on the computer at the empty desk. “He was doing some of the basic research on the Steinkraus file. Under my direction, of course.”

Becker went carefully through the desk drawers, searching without expectation. He was not disappointed to find nothing beyond the essentials of office work.

“You know Steinkraus Industries, of course. The holding company? It’s my baby.”

Chaney nodded toward the screen where columns of figures meaningless to Becker vibrated ever so slightly as if waiting their turn to dance.

“Quite a job,” said Becker. Chaney grinned proudly and nodded. “Was Dyce working on anything else?”

“Not at the moment. Not officially at any rate.”

“And unofficially?”

“I could look at his files,” Chaney said, pushing a key and summoning up the contents of Dyce’s computer.

“Treat me as a computer illiterate,” Becker said.

“Well… he was working on a lot of things, or had been in the past. It would take awhile to figure out just what. Some of it is here, and some of it—see that symbol there?—that means he was accessing other computers to get more data. It will take a little doing to find out what exactly is in there.”

“But you could do it?”