CHAPTER 28
WITH MURDER ON HIS MIND BUT NOT ON HIS conscience, Corky Laputa, fresh from the vault of the nameless dead, crossed the city in the night rain.
As he drove, he thought about his father, perhaps because Henry James Laputa had squandered his life as surely as the vagrants and teenage runaways bunking at the morgue had squandered theirs.
Corky?s mother, the economist, had believed in the righteousness of envy, in the power of hatred. Her life had been consumed by both, and she had worn bitterness as though it were a crown.
His father believed in the necessity of envy as a motivator. His perpetual envy led inevitably to chronic hatred whether he believed in the power of hatred or not.
Henry James Laputa had been a professor of American literature. He had also been a novelist with dreams of worthy fame.
He chose the most acclaimed writers of his time to envy. With fierce diligence, he begrudged them every good review, every word of praise, every honor and award. He seethed at news of their successes.
Thus motivated, he produced novels in a white-hot passion, works meant to make the fiction of his contemporaries appear shallow and [193] pallid and puerile by comparison. He wanted to humble other writers, humiliate them by example, inspire in them an envy greater than any he?d directed against them, for only then could he let go of his own envy and at last enjoy his accomplishments.
He believed that one day these literati would be so jealous of him that they?d be unable to take any pleasure in their own careers. When they coveted his literary reputation with such intensity that they were avaricious for it, when they burned with shame that their greatest efforts were fading embers compared to the bonfire of his talent, then Henry Laputa would be happy, fulfilled.
Year after year, however, his novels had received only lukewarm praise, and much of this had flowed from the pens of critics who were not of the highest tier. The expected award nominations never came. The deserved honors were not conferred. His genius went unrecognized.
Indeed, he detected that many of his literary contemporaries patronized him, which led him to recognize, at long last, that they were all members of a club from which he?d been blackballed. They did recognize the superiority of his talent, but they conspired to deny him the laurels that he had earned, for they were intent on keeping the pieces of the pie that they had cut for themselves.
Pie. Henry realized that even in the literary community, the god of gods was money. Their dirty little secret. They handed awards back and forth, blathering about art, but were interested only in using these honors to pump their careers and get rich.
This insight into the conspiratorial greed of the literati was fertilizer, water, and sunshine to the garden of Henry?s hatred. The black flowers of antipathy flourished as never before.
Frustrated by their refusal to accord him the acclaim that he desired, Henry set out to earn their envy by writing a novel that would be an enormous commercial success. He believed that he knew all the tricks of plotting and the many uses of treacly sentimentality by [194] which such hacks as Dickens manipulated the unwashed masses. He would write an irresistible tale, make millions, and let the phony literati be consumed by jealousy.
This commercial epic found a publisher but not an audience. The royalties were meager. Instead of showering him with money, the god of mammon left him standing in a manure storm, which was exactly what one major critic called his novel.
As more years passed, Henry?s hatred thickened into a malignity of pure, persistent, and singularly venomous quality. He cherished this malignity, and in time it soured and festered into rancor as virulent and implacable as pancreatic cancer.
At the age of fifty-three, while delivering a caustic speech full of fire and outrage to an indifferent crowd of academics at the Modern Language Association?s annual convention, Henry James Laputa suffered a massive heart attack. He fell instantly dead with such authority that some audience members thought he?d daringly punctuated a point with a pratfall, and they applauded briefly before realizing that here was death indeed, not shtick.
Corky had learned so much from his parents. He had learned that envy alone does not constitute a philosophy. He?d learned that a fun lifestyle and cheerful optimism cannot exist in the face of all-consuming, all-embracing hatred without surcease.
He?d also learned not to trust in laws, idealism, or art.
His mother had trusted in the laws of economics, in the ideals of Marxism. She ended as a bitter old woman, without hope or purpose, who seemed almost relieved when her own son had beaten her to death with a fireplace poker.
Corky?s father had believed that he could use art like a hammer to beat the world into submission. The world still turned, but Dad had gone to ashes, scattered in the sea, dispersed, as if he?d never existed.
Chaos.
Chaos was the only dependable force in the universe, and Corky [195] served it with the confidence that it would, in turn, always serve him.
Across the glistening city, through the night and unrelenting rain, he drove to West Hollywood, where the undependable Rolf Reynerd needed to die.
Both ends of the block where Reynerd lived were closed off by police barricades. Officers in black rain slickers with fluorescent yellow stripes used chemical-light torches to redirect traffic.
In the basic colors of emergency, bright skeins of rain raveled through the pulsing ambulance beacons and knitted urgent patterns on the puddled pavement.
Corky drove past the barricade. Within two blocks, he found a parking place.
Perhaps the official bustle on Rolf Reynerd?s street had no connection with the actor, but Corky?s intuition insisted otherwise.
He wasn?t worried. Whatever mess Rolf Reynerd had gotten himself into, Corky would find a way to use the situation to further his own agenda. Tumble and tumult were his friends, and he was confident that in the church of chaos, he was a favored child.