Forever Odd

Racing after that fading red trace, certain that I was gaining now because they had to slow to take the tight turn, I fumbled the cell phone from my pocket.

When I arrived where alley met alley, the van had vanished, also every glimmer and glow of it. Surprised, I looked up, half expecting to see it levitating into the desert sky.

I speed-dialed Chief Porter’s mobile number—and discovered that no charge was left in the battery. I hadn’t plugged it in overnight.

Dumpsters in starlight, hulking and odorous, bracketed back entrances to restaurants and shops. Most of the wire-caged security lamps, managed by timers, had switched off in this last hour before dawn.

Some of the two- and three-story buildings featured roll-up doors. Behind most would be small receiving rooms for deliveries of merchandise and supplies; only a few might be garages, but I had no way to determine which they were.

Pocketing the useless phone, I hurried forward a few steps. Then I halted: unsettled, uncertain.

Holding my breath, I listened. I heard only my storming heart, the thunder of my blood, no engine either idling or receding, no doors opening or closing, no voices.

I had been running. I couldn’t hold my breath for long. The echo of my exhalation traveled the narrow throat of the alleyway.

At the nearest of the big doors, I put my right ear to the corrugated steel. The space beyond seemed to be as soundless as a vacuum.

Crossing and recrossing the alley, from roll-up to roll-up, I heard no clue, saw no evidence, but felt hope ticking away.

I thought of the snake man driving. Danny must have been in back, with Simon.

Again I was running. Out of the alley, into the next street, right to the intersection, left onto Palomino Avenue, before I fully understood that I had given myself to psychic magnetism once more, or rather that it had seized me.

As reliably as a homing pigeon returns to its dovecote, a dray horse to its stable, a bee to its hive, I sought not home and hearth, but trouble. I left Palomino Avenue for another alley, and surprised three cats into hissing flight.

The boom of a gun startled me more than I had frightened the cats. I almost tucked and rolled, but instead dodged between two Dumpsters, my back to a brick wall.

Echoes of echoes deceived the ear, concealed the source. The report had been loud, most likely a shotgun blast. But I couldn’t determine the point of origin.

I had no weapon at hand. A dead cell phone isn’t much of a blunt instrument.

In my strange and dangerous life, I have only once resorted to a gun. I shot a man with it. He had been killing people with a gun of his own.

Shooting him dead saved lives. I have no intellectual or moral argument with the use of firearms any more than I do with the use of spoons or socket wrenches.

My problem with guns is emotional. They fascinate my mother. In my childhood, she made much grim use of a pistol, as I have recounted in a previous manuscript.

I cannot easily separate the rightful use of a gun from the sick purpose to which she put hers. In my hand, a firearm feels as if it has a life of its own, a cold and squamous kind of life, and also a wicked intent too slippery to control.

One day my aversion to firearms might be the death of me. But I’ve never been under the illusion that I will live forever. If not a gun, a germ will get me, a poison or a pickax.

After huddling between the Dumpsters for a minute, perhaps two, I came to the conclusion that the shotgun blast had not been meant for me. If I’d been seen and marked for death, the shooter would have approached without delay, pumping another round into the chamber and then into me.

Above some of these downtown businesses were apartments. Lights had bloomed in a few of them, the shotgun having made moot the later settings of alarm clocks.

On the move again, I found myself drawn to the next intersection of alleyways, then left without hesitation. Less than half a block ahead stood the white van, this side of the kitchen entrance to the Blue Moon Cafe.

Beside the Blue Moon is a parking lot that runs through to the main street. The van appeared to have been abandoned at the rear of this lot, nose out toward the alleyway.

Both front doors stood open, spilling light, no one visible beyond the windshield. As I drew cautiously closer, I heard the engine idling.

This suggested that they had fled in haste. Or intended to return for a quick getaway.

The Blue Moon doesn’t serve breakfast, only lunch and dinner. Kitchen workers do not begin to arrive until a couple hours after dawn. The cafe should have been locked. I doubted that Simon had shot his way inside to raid the restaurant refrigerators.

There are easier ways to get a cold chicken leg, though maybe none quicker.

I couldn’t imagine where they had gone—or why they abandoned the van if in fact they were not returning.

From one of the second-floor lighted apartment windows, an elderly woman in a blue robe gazed down. She appeared less alarmed than curious.

I eased to the passenger’s side of the vehicle, slowly circled toward the rear.

At the back, the pair of doors on the cargo hold also stood open. Interior light revealed no one inside.

Sirens rose in the night, approaching.

I wondered who had fired the shotgun, at whom, and why.

As deformed and vulnerable as he is, Danny couldn’t have wrested the weapon away from his tormentors. Even if he had tried to use the shotgun, the recoil would have broken his shoulder, if not also one of his arms.

Turning in a circle, mystified, I wondered what had happened to my friend with brittle bones.

10

P. OSWALD BOONE, FOUR-HUNDRED-POUND culinary black belt in white silk pajamas, whom I’d recently awakened, moved with the grace and swiftness of a dojo master as he whipped up breakfast in the kitchen of his Craftsman-style house.

At times his weight scares me, and I worry about his suffering heart. But when he’s cooking, he seems weightless, floating, like those gravity-defying warriors in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—though he didn’t actually bound over the center island.

Watching him that February morning, I considered that if he had spent his life killing himself with food, it might also be true that without the solace and refuge of food, he would have been dead long ago. Every life is complicated, every mind a kingdom of unmapped mysteries, and Ozzie’s more than most.

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

He is a writer, with two successful series of mystery novels and numerous nonfiction books to his credit. He is so productive that the day may come when one copy of each of his books, stacked on a scale, will surpass his body weight.

Because he had assured me that writing would prove to be psychic chemotherapy effective against psychological tumors, I had written my true story of loss and perseverance—and had put it in a drawer, at peace if not happy. To his dismay, I had told him that I was done with writing.

I believed it, too. Now here I am again, putting words to paper, serving as my own psychological oncologist.

Perhaps in time I will follow Ozzie’s every example, and weigh four hundred pounds. I won’t be able to run with ghosts and slip down dark alleyways in quite the swift and stealthy fashion that I do now; but perhaps children will be amused by my hippopotamic heroics, and no one will disagree that bringing laughter to children in a dark world is admirable.

While Ozzie cooked, I told him about Dr. Jessup and all that had occurred since the dead radiologist had come to me in the middle of the night. Although as I recounted events I worried about Danny, I worried as well about Terrible Chester.

Terrible Chester, the cat about which every dog has nightmares, allows Ozzie to live with him. Ozzie cherishes this feline no less than he loves food and books.

Although Terrible Chester has never clawed me with the ferocity of which I believe he is capable, he has more than once urinated on my shoes. Ozzie says this is an expression of affection. This theory holds that the cat is marking me with his scent to identify me as an approved member of his family.

I have noticed that when Terrible Chester wishes to express his affection for Ozzie, he does so by cuddling and purring.

Since Ozzie opened the front door to me, as we passed through the house, and during the time that I sat in the kitchen, I had not seen Terrible Chester. This made me nervous. My shoes were new.

He is a big cat, so fearless and self-impressed that he disdains sneaking. He doesn’t creep into a room, but always makes an entrance. Although he expects to be the center of attention, he projects an air of indifference—even contempt—that makes it clear he wishes for the most part to be adored from a distance.

Although he does not sneak, he can appear at your shoes suddenly and by surprise. The first indication of trouble can be a briefly mystifying warm dampness of the toes.

Until Ozzie and I moved to the back porch to take our breakfast al fresco, I kept my feet off the floor, on a chair rung.

The porch overlooks a lawn and a half-acre woodlet of laurels, podocarpus, and graceful California peppers. In the golden morning sunshine, songbirds trilled and death seemed like a myth.

Had the table not been a sturdy redwood model, it would have groaned under the plates of lobster omelets, bowls of potatoes au gratin, stacks of toast, bagels, Danish, cinnamon rolls, pitchers of orange juice and milk, pots of coffee and cocoa. …

“‘What is food to one is to others bitter poison,’” Ozzie quoted happily, toasting me with a raised forkful of omelet.

“Shakespeare?” I asked.

“Lucretius, who wrote before the birth of Christ. Lad, I promise you this—I shall never be one of these health wimps who views a pint of heavy cream with the same horror that saner men reserve for atomic weapons.”

“Sir, those of us who care about you would suggest that vanilla soy milk isn’t the abomination you say it is.”

“I do not permit blasphemy, the F-word, or obscenities such as soy milk at my table. Consider yourself chastised.”

“I stopped in Gelato Italiano the other day. They now have some flavors with half the fat.”

He said, “The horses stabled at our local racetrack produce tons of manure each week, and I don’t stock my freezer with that, either. So where does Wyatt Porter think Danny might be?”

“Most likely Simon earlier stashed a second set of wheels in the lot beside the Blue Moon, in case things went bad at the Jessup house and someone saw him leaving there in the van.”

“But no one saw the van at the Jessup house, so it wasn’t a hot vehicle.”

“No.”

“Yet he switched at the Blue Moon anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Does that make sense to you?”

“It makes more sense than anything else.”

“For sixteen years, he remained obsessed with Carol, so obsessed that he wanted Dr. Jessup dead for having married her.”

“So it seems.”

“What does he want with Danny?”

“I don’t know.”

“Simon doesn’t seem like the type who’d yearn for an emotionally satisfying father-son relationship.”

“It doesn’t fit the profile,” I agreed.

“How’s your omelet?”

“Fantastic, sir.”

“There’s cream in it, and butter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Also parsley. I’m not opposed to a portion of green vegetables now and then. Roadblocks won’t be effective if Simon’s second vehicle has four-wheel drive and he goes overland.”

“The sheriff’s department is assisting with aerial patrols.”

“Do you have any sense whether Danny’s still in Pico Mundo?”

“I get this strange feeling.”

“Strange—how?”

“A wrongness.”

“A wrongness?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, everything’s crystal-clear now.”

“Sorry. I don’t know. I can’t be specific.”

“He isn’t … dead?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“More orange juice? It’s fresh-squeezed.”

As he poured, I said, “Sir, I’ve been wondering—where’s Terrible Chester?”

“Watching you,” he said, and pointed.

When I turned in my chair, I saw the cat ten feet behind me and above, perched on an exposed ceiling truss that supported the porch roof.

He is reddish-orange with black markings. His eyes are as green as emeralds fired by sunlight.

Ordinarily, Terrible Chester favors me—or anyone—with only a casual glance, as if human beings bore him beyond tolerance. With his eyes and attitude, he can express a dismissive judgment of humanity, a contempt, that even a minimalist writer like Cormac McCarthy would need twenty pages to convey.

Never previously had I been an object of intense interest to Chester. Now he held my gaze, did not look away, did not blink, and seemed to find me to be as fascinating as a three-headed extraterrestrial.

Although he didn’t appear to be poised to pounce, I did not feel comfortable turning my back on this formidable cat; however, I felt less comfortable engaging in a staring match with him. He would not look away from me.

When I faced the table again, Ozzie was taking the liberty of spooning another serving of potatoes onto my plate.

I said, “He’s never stared at me like that before.”

“He was staring at you much the same way the entire time we were in the kitchen.”

“I didn’t see him in the kitchen.”

“When you weren’t looking, he crept into the room, pawed open a cabinet door, and hid under the sink.”

“He must’ve been quick.”

“Oh, Odd, he was a prince of cats, lightning-quick and quiet. I was so proud of him. Once inside the cabinet, he held the door ajar with his body and watched you from concealment.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because I wanted to see what he would do next.”

“Most likely it involves shoes and urine.”

“I don’t think so,” Ozzie said. “This is all new.”

“Is he still up there on the beam?”

“Yes.”

“And still watching me?”

“Intently. Would you like a Danish?”

“I’ve sort of lost my appetite.”

“Don’t be silly, lad. Because of Chester?”

“He has something to do with it. I’m remembering once before when he was this intense.”

“Refresh my memory.”

I couldn’t prevent my voice from thickening. “August … and all of that.”

Ozzie stabbed the air with a fork: “Oh. You mean, the ghost.”

The previous August, I had discovered that, like me, Terrible Chester can see those troubled souls who linger this side of death. He had regarded that spirit no less intently than he now studied me.

“You aren’t dead,” Ozzie assured me. “You’re as solid as this redwood table, though not as solid as me.”

“Maybe Chester knows something I don’t.”

“Dear Odd, because you’re such a naive young man in some ways, I’m sure there’s a great deal he knows that you don’t. What did you have in mind?”

“Like that my time’s soon up.”

“I’m sure it’s something less apocalyptic.”

“Such as?”

“Are you carrying any dead mice in your pockets?”

“Just a dead cell phone.”

Ozzie studied me solemnly. He was genuinely concerned. At the same time, he is too good a friend ever to coddle me.

“Well,” he said, “if your time is soon up, all the more reason to have a Danish. The one with pineapple and cheese would be the perfect thing with which to end a last meal.”

11

WHEN I SUGGESTED THAT I HELP CLEAN OFF the table and wash the dishes before going, Little Ozzie—who is actually fifty pounds heavier than his father, Big Ozzie—dismissed the suggestion by gesturing emphatically with a slice of buttered toast.

“We’ve only been sitting here forty minutes. I’m never at the morning table less than an hour and a half. I do some of my finest plotting over breakfast coffee and raisin brioche.”

“You should write a series set in the culinary world.”

“Already, bookstore shelves overflow with mysteries about chefs who are detectives, food critics who are detectives. …”

One of Ozzie’s series features a hugely obese detective with a slim sexy wife who adores him. Ozzie has never married.

His other series is about a likable female detective with lots of neuroses—and bulimia. Ozzie is about as likely to develop bulimia himself as he is likely to change his wardrobe entirely to spandex.

“I’ve considered,” he said, “starting a series about a detective who is a pet communicator.”

“One of those people who claims to be able to talk to animals?”

“Yes, but he would be the real thing.”

“So animals would help him solve crimes?” I asked.

“They would, yes, but they’d also complicate his cases. Dogs would almost always tell him the truth, but birds would often lie, and guinea pigs would be earnest but prone to exaggeration.”

“I feel for the guy already.”

In silence, Ozzie spread lemon marmalade on brioche, while I picked at the pineapple-cheese Danish with a fork.

I needed to leave. I needed to do something. Sitting still another moment seemed intolerable.

I nibbled some Danish.

We seldom sit in silence. He’s never at a loss for words; I can usually find a few of my own.

After a minute or two, I realized that Ozzie was staring at me no less intently than was Terrible Chester.

I had attributed this lull in the conversation to his need to chew. Now I realized this could not be the case.

Brioche is made with eggs, yeast, and butter. It melts in your mouth with very little chewing.

Ozzie had fallen silent because he was brooding. And he was brooding about me.

“What?” I asked.

“You didn’t come here for breakfast,” he said.

“Certainly not for this much breakfast.”

“And you didn’t come here to tell me about Wilbur Jessup, or about Danny.”

“Well, yes, that is why I came, sir.”

“Then you’ve told me, and you obviously don’t want that Danish, so I suppose you’ll be going now.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “I should be going,” but I didn’t get up from my chair.

Pouring a fragrant Colombian blend from a thermos shaped like a coffeepot, Ozzie did not once shift his eyes from me.

“I’ve never known you to be deceitful with anyone, Odd.”

“I assure you I can dissemble with the best of them, sir.”

“No, you can’t. You’re a poster boy for sincerity. You have all the guile of a lamb.”

I looked away from him—and discovered that Terrible Chester had descended from the roof beams. The cat sat on the top porch step, still staring intently at me.

“But more amazing still,” Ozzie continued, “I’ve seldom known you to indulge in self-deceit.”

“When will I be canonized, sir?”

“Smart-mouthing your elders will forever keep you out of the company of saints.”

“Darn. I was looking forward to having a halo. It would make such a convenient reading lamp.”

“As for self-deceit, most people find it as essential for survival as air. You rarely indulge in it. Yet you insist you came here just to tell me about Wilbur and Danny.”

“Have I been insisting?”

“Not with conviction.”

“Why do you think I came here?” I asked.

“You’ve always mistaken my absolute self-assurance for profound thought,” he said without hesitation, “so when you’re looking for deep insight, you seek an audience with me.”

“You mean all the profound insights you’ve given me over the years were actually shallow?”

“Of course they were, dear Odd. Like you, I’m only human, even if I have eleven fingers.”

He does have eleven, six on his left hand. He says one in ninety thousand babies is born with this affliction. Surgeons routinely amputate the unneeded digit.

For some reason that Ozzie has never shared with me, his parents refused permission for the surgery. He was the fascination of other children: the eleven-fingered boy; eventually, the eleven-fingered fat boy; and then the eleven-fingered fat boy with the withering wit.

“As shallow as my insights might have been,” he said, “they were sincerely offered.”

“That’s some comfort, I guess.”

“Anyway, you came here today with a burning philosophical question that’s troubling you, but it troubles you so much you don’t want to ask, after all.”

“No, that isn’t it,” I said.

I looked at the congealing remains of my lobster omelet. At Terrible Chester. At the lawn. At the small woods so green in the morning sun.

Ozzie’s moon-round face could be smug and loving at the same time. His eyes twinkled with an expectation of being proved right.

At last I said, “You know Ernie and Pooka Ying.”

“Lovely people.”

“The tree in their backyard …”

“The brugmansia. It’s a magnificent specimen.”

“Everything about it is deadly, every root and leaf.”

Ozzie smiled as Buddha would have smiled if Buddha had written mystery novels and had relished exotic methods of murder. He nodded approvingly. “Exquisitely poisonous, yes.”

“Why would nice people like Ernie and Pooka want to grow such a deadly tree?”

“For one thing, because it’s beautiful, especially when it’s in flower.”

“The flowers are toxic, too.”

After popping a final morsel of marmaladed brioche into his mouth and savoring it, Ozzie licked his lips and said, “One of those enormous blooms contains sufficient poison, if properly extracted, to kill perhaps a third of the people in Pico Mundo.”

“It seems reckless, even perverse, to spend so much time and effort nurturing such a deadly thing.”

“Does Ernie Ying strike you as a reckless and perverse man?”

“Just the opposite.”

“Ah, then Pooka must be the monster. Her self-deprecating manner must disguise a heart of the most malevolent intention.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “it seems to me that a friend might not take such pleasure in making fun of me as you do.”

“Dear Odd, if one’s friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends. How else would one learn to avoid saying those things that would elicit laughter from strangers? The mockery of friends is affectionate, and inoculates against foolishness.”

“That sure sounds profound,” I said.

“Medium shallow,” he assured me. “May I educate you, lad?”

“You can try.”

“There’s nothing reckless about growing the brugmansia. Equally poisonous plants are everywhere in Pico Mundo.”

I was dubious. “Everywhere?”

“You’re so busy with the supernatural world that you know too little about the natural.”

“I don’t get much time to go bowling, either.”

“Those flowering oleander hedges all over town? Oleander in Sanskrit means ‘horse killer.’ Every part of the plant is deadly.”

“I like the variety with red flowers.”

“If you burn it, the smoke is poisonous,” Ozzie said. “If bees spend too much time with oleander, the honey will kill you. Azaleas are equally fatal.”

“Everybody plants azaleas.”

“Oleander will kill you quickly. Azaleas, ingested, take a few hours. Vomiting, paralysis, seizures, coma, death. Then there’s savin, henbane, foxglove, jimsonweed … all here in Pico Mundo.”

“And we call her Mother Nature.”

“There’s nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either,” Ozzie said.

“But, sir, Ernie and Pooka Ying know the brugmansia is deadly. In fact, its deadliness is why they planted and nurtured it.”

“Think of it as a Zen thing.”

“I would—if I knew what that meant.”

“Ernie and Pooka seek to understand death and to master their fear of it by domesticating it in the form of the brugmansia.”