The Vision (11 page)

The other gull flew away from the bar and left the room through the broken window.

Everything was quiet, still.

At last the intense, dark-skinned young man stood up, helped the blonde to her feet.

The heavyset, red-haired man at the bar tossed down his drink in one gulp.

“Christ, what a mess!” the bartender said. “What happened? Did anyone ever see gulls act like that before?”

Max touched her cheek. “Are you okay?”

She leaned on him and wept.

11

6:30.

Lights speckled the nighttime King’s Point hills like orange flame gleaming from within a jack-o’-lantern with a thousand eyes. To the west the ocean and sky melted into a single black shroud.

Max parked at the curb, switched off the headlights. He leaned over and kissed Mary. “You look lovely tonight.”

She smiled. Surprisingly, in spite of what had happened to her today, she felt lovely, feminine, buoyant. “That makes six times you’ve told me.”

“Seven’s a lucky number. You look lovely tonight.” He kissed her again. “Do you feel better? Are you relaxed?”

“The man who invented Valium should be made a saint.”

“
You
should be made a saint,” he said. “Now don’t move. I’m feeling terribly chivalrous. I’ll come around and open your door.”

The wind from the sea was no stronger than it had been during the day, although with nightfall it grew colder and seemed also to grow noisier. It shook badly fitted shutters until they clattered. It worried loosely hinged garage doors, made them groan and creak. It scraped tree branches against the side of the house, tipped over empty trash barrels, stirred brittle feathered-end palm fronds together in a chorus of snakelike hissing, and rolled a few discarded soda cans along the streets.

Sheltered from the worst of the wind by dense shrubs, pine trees, and date palms, the small single-story house at 440 Ocean Hill Lane looked warm and cozy. Soft light radiated from the leaded windows. A carriage lamp glowed beside the front door.

Lou Pasternak—owner, publisher, and editor of the twice-a-week
King’s Point Press
—answered the bell and hustled them inside. While they told each other how well they looked and how happy they were to see each other again, Pasternak kissed Mary on the cheek, shook hands with Max, and hung their coats in the closet.

Being in Lou’s presence was, she thought, as relaxing as taking a tranquilizer. Except for Max and her own brother, Mary liked Lou more than any other man she’d ever met. He was intelligent, kind, too generous. He was also the worst cynic she had ever met, but the cynicism was tempered by humility and a marvelous sense of humor.

She worried about him because he drank too much. But he knew he did, and he was able to talk about his drinking dispassionately. He argued that if you understood how screwed up the world was, if you saw how like a paradise it
could
be, if you understood that what could be never
would
be because most people were hopeless jackasses—well, then you needed a crutch to get through life with your sanity intact. For some people, he said, it was money or drugs or any of a hundred other things. His crutch was Scotch. And damned good bourbon.

“My mother,” Mary sometimes said to him, “led a miserable life as an alcoholic.”

“Your mother,” Lou always responded, “sounds like an alcoholic who didn’t know how to hold her liquor. There’s nothing worse than a sloppy drunk—unless it’s a self-pitying drunk.”

His drinking didn’t appear to interfere with the full life he led. He had built and still operated an extremely successful business. His editorials and reportage had won several national awards. At forty-five, although he had never been married, he had more women friends than any man Mary knew. At the moment he lived alone, but that would not last.

Although she had seen him consume Herculean quantities of liquor, she had never seen him drunk. He did not stagger, slur his speech, become maudlin or loud or obnoxious. He not only could hold his liquor, he thrived on it.

“I don’t drink to escape my responsibilities,” he had once told her. “I drink to escape the consequences of other people’s inability to meet
their
responsibilities.”

“Alcohol killed my mother,” she warned him. “I don’t want to see you die.”

“We all die, my dear. It’s just as good to drop of a rotted liver as it is to be felled by cancer or a stroke. Actually, I think it’s better.”

She loved him as much as she loved Max, though in different ways.

He was a stocky man, a full foot shorter than Max’s six four, even slightly shorter than Mary. He was solidly constructed. His neck, shoulders, arms, and chest were thick with muscle, powerful. He was wearing a white shirt; the sleeves were rolled up; and his forearms were matted with hair.

His face was in stark contrast to his body. He had the fine features of an inbred aristocrat. He combed his brown hair straight back from his face. His brow was high; his lively brown eyes were deeply set and sensitive; his nose was narrow, the nostrils delicate; and his mouth was almost prim. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles that made him look as if he was a college professor.

“Bourbon and ice,” he said, picking up a tall glass from the slate-topped foyer table. “My third since I got home from work. In case the wind blows down the power lines later on, I intend to be so lit up that I can do my bedtime reading by my own light.”

Although there were armchairs and a comfortable sofa, the living room was primarily furnished with books, magazines, record albums, and paintings. Stacks of books stood beside and behind the couch; books filled the space under the coffee table; recent issues of magazines overflowed a rack meant to hold a hundred of them. The one wall that was free of records and books was covered with original oils, pastels, and watercolors by local painters. Dozens of pieces in every imaginable style had been squeezed so close that their beauty overlapped; they intruded upon one another; but Lou’s taste was so good that even under these circumstances the eye was caught and held by each work at some point during a long evening. One of the armchairs was more tattered and lumpy than the other. That was where Lou sat, reading half a dozen books each week, drinking too much, and listening to opera, Benny Goodman, or Bach.

It was the friendliest room Mary had ever seen.

Lou brought their drinks. He put Bach, interpreted by Eugene Ormandy, on the stereo at low volume. “Now let’s hear the whole story. Since you called this morning, I’ve been half crazy wondering what this is about. You were so mysterious.”

Interrupted frequently by Lou’s questions, digressing into discussions of poltergeists, Mary told him everything. She began with the tracking down of Richard Lingard and ended with the seagull attack at the Laughing Dolphin.

When she finished, the house was abnormally quiet. A grandfather clock ticked solemnly in the dining room.

Thinking about what she had said, Lou poured himself more bourbon. When he returned to his armchair, he said, “So tomorrow night at seven o’clock this killer will stab two people, perhaps killing one of them. Then he’ll climb a tower and start to shoot.”

“You believe me?” she asked.

“Of course. I’ve followed your work for years, haven’t I?”

“You believe about Lingard’s spirit?”

“If you say I should, why wouldn’t I?”

She glanced at Max.

“Will this man have anyone to shoot at tomorrow night?” Max asked. “Won’t just about everyone be at home with their families on Christmas Eve?”

“Oh,” Lou said, “he’ll have plenty of targets around the harbor. There’ll be Christmas Eve parties on dozens of boats. People on the decks. People on the docks. People everywhere.”

“I don’t think we can stop the stabbings from taking place,” Mary said. “But maybe we can keep him from shooting anyone. Policemen can be stationed in all three towers.”

“One problem,” Lou said.

“What’s that?”

“John Patmore.”

“Your chief of police.”

“Unfortunately, he is. It’s not going to be easy to convince him that he should heed your visions.”

“If he thinks there’s even the slightest chance I might be right,” Mary said, “why shouldn’t he cooperate? After all, his job is to protect the people of King’s Point.”

Lou smiled crookedly. “My dear, you should know by now that many cops don’t see their jobs quite the same way as taxpayers do. Some cops think that all they’re required to do is wear fancy fascist uniforms, ride around in flashy patrol cars, collect envelopes of graft money, and retire at the public expense after twenty or thirty years of ‘service.’”

“You’re too cynical,” she said.

“Percy Osterman told us Patmore’s difficult,” Max added.

“Difficult? He’s stupid,” Lou said. “Ignorant beyond description. The only reason you can’t accuse him of being scatterbrained is because he doesn’t have any brains to scatter. I’m sure he’s never heard the word ‘clairvoyant.’ And when we are finally able to make him understand what it means, he won’t believe it. If something’s not within his personal experience, he doesn’t accept its existence. I’m positive he’d argue against the reality of Europe simply because he’s never been there.”

“He can call some police chiefs I’ve worked with,” Mary said. “They’ll convince him I’m genuine.”

“If he’s never met them, he won’t believe a word they say. I tell you, Mary, if ignorance is really bliss, then he’s the happiest man in the world.”

“Sheriff Osterman said we could tell Patmore to call him for an endorsement,” Max said.

Lou nodded. “That might help. Patmore’s impressed with Osterman. And I’ll go with you to see him if you’d like. But I’ve got to warn you that I won’t help your cause very much. Patmore hates me.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Max said. “Except, you probably talk like this about him to his face.”

Grinning, Lou said, “I’ve never been able to hide my true feelings, and that’s a fact. You’ve met Mrs. Yancy, his flunky?”

“She was the only one in the office this afternoon,” Max said.

“Isn’t she a gem?”

“Is she?”

“A miracle worker,” Lou said. “It’s a miracle when she works.”

“She
didn’t
seem too efficient,” Mary said.

Lou said, “She’s a steady worker—and if she gets any steadier, she’ll be motionless.”

Mary laughed, sipped her dry sherry.

“Now, getting back to those seagulls,” Lou said. “Do—”

“No more about the gulls,” Mary said. “No more about any of that. Tomorrow’s soon enough. Tonight I want to forget about clairvoyance and talk about something else. Anything else.”

* * *

Dinner was filet
mignon, salad, baked potatoes, and cold asparagus spears.

As Max was opening the bottle of red wine they’d brought as a gift, Lou noticed the bandage. “Max, what happened to your finger?”

“Oh . . . I cut it changing a flat tire.”

“Stitches?”

“It wasn’t that serious.”

“He should have seen a doctor,” Mary said. “He wouldn’t even let me look at it. There was so much blood—blood all over his shirt.”

“I thought you might have been in a fight again,” Lou said.

“I don’t go to bars anymore,” Max said. “I don’t fight these days.”

Lou looked at Mary, raised an eyebrow.

“It’s true,” she said.

“You worked two years for me,” Lou said. “In all that time you never went more than a month or six weeks without getting in a bad fight. You went to the worst bars along the coast—biker bars and worse, to all the places where you were most likely to wind up in trouble. Sometimes I wondered if you went drinking more for the fighting than for the liquor.”

“Maybe I did,” Max said, frowning. “I had problems. What I needed was someone who needed me. Now I’ve got Mary, and I don’t fight.”

Although he had promised not to talk about clairvoyance anymore that night, Lou found himself unable to drop the subject during dinner. “Do you think the killer knows you’re in town?”

“I don’t know,” Mary said.

“If he’s possessed by a spirit, and if the same spirit possessed those gulls, then surely he knows.”

“I guess he does.”

“Won’t he play it safe until after you leave town?”

“Maybe he will,” she said. “But I doubt it.”

“He wants to get caught?”

“Or he wants to catch me.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know.”

“If—”

“Can we change the subject?”

* * *

After she had
finished eating, Mary excused herself from the table and went to the bathroom at the far end of the house.

When he was alone with Max, Lou asked, “What about this notion of hers?”

“That Lingard’s come back from the dead?”

“Do you put any stock in that?”

“You’re the student of the occult,” Max said. “You’re the one with hundreds of books on the subject. Besides, you’ve known her longer than I have. You’re the one who introduced us. What do you think?”

“I’ve got an open mind,” Lou said. “I gather you don’t.”

“Her analyst says
she
threw those glass dogs.”

“Unconscious telekinesis?” Lou asked.

“That’s right.”

“Has she ever shown telekinetic ability before?”

“No,” Max said.

“What about the revolver?”

“I think she was controlling that, too.”

“Shooting at herself?”

“Yes,” Max said.

“And she was guiding the seagulls?”

“Yes.”

“Controlling living animals . . . that’s not telekinesis.”

“It’s telepathy of a sort,” Max said.

Lou refilled his wineglass. “That’s rare.”

“It has to be telepathy. I can’t believe those seagulls were guided by a dead man’s spirit.”

“Why would she want to kill herself?”

“She doesn’t,” Max said.

“Well, if
she
is the poltergeist behind these phenomena, if
she
levitated that revolver, then it seems to me that she was trying to kill herself.”

“If she was suicidal,” Max said, “she wouldn’t have missed. But she
did
miss with the glass dogs, with the revolver, and with the gulls.”

“Then what’s she doing?” Lou asked. “Why is she playing the part of a poltergeist?”

Max frowned. “I have a theory. I think there’s something special about this case, something unusual. She’s foreseen something about it that she refuses to face up to. Something devastating. Something that would completely unhinge her if she thought about it for long. So she pushed it out of her mind. Of course, she could only push it out of her
conscious
mind. The subconscious never forgets. Now, every time she attempts to pursue a vision that’s connected to this case, her subconscious uses the poltergeist phenomena to distract her.”