CHAPTER 30
IF THE SKY OPENED TO DISGORGE A DELUGE OF fanged and poisonous toads, if the wind blew hard enough to flay the skin to bloody ruin and to blind the unprotected eye, even such cataclysmic weather would fail to dissuade ghouls and gossips from gathering at the scenes of spectacular accidents and shocking crimes. By comparison, a steady drizzle on a cool December night was picnic weather to this crowd that followed misery as others might follow baseball.
On the front lawn of an apartment house, catercorner across the intersection from the police barricade, twenty to thirty neighborhood residents gathered to share misinformation and gory details. The majority were adults, but half a dozen energized children capered among them.
Most of these sociable vultures were outfitted in rain gear or carried umbrellas. Two bare-chested and barefoot young men, however, wore only blue jeans and appeared to be so steeped in a marinade of illegal substances that the night could not chill them, as though they were being cooked flamelessly like fish fillets in lime juice.
An air of carnival had settled upon this gathering, expectations of fireworks and freaks.
[200] In all his glistening yellowness, Corky Laputa moved among the onlookers, like a buzzless bumblebee patiently gathering a morsel of nectar here, a morsel there. From time to time, to blend better with the swarm and to win friends, he offered a taste of ersatz honey, inventing florid details of the vicious crime that he claimed to have heard from cops manning the second barricade at the farther end of the block.
He quickly learned that Rolf Reynerd had been killed.
The gossips and the ghouls weren?t sure if the victim?s first name was Ralph or Rafe, Dolph or Randolph. Or Bob.
They were pretty sure that the luckless fellow?s last name was either Reinhardt or Kleinhard, or Reiner like the film director, or maybe Spielberg like another famous director, or Nerdoff, or possibly Nordoff.
One of the bare-chested young men insisted that everyone had confused the victim?s first name, surname, and nickname. According to this wizard of deductive reasoning, the dead man?s true identity was Ray ?the Nerd? Rolf.
All agreed that the murdered man had been an actor whose career had recently rocketed toward stardom. He had just completed a film in which he played Tom Cruise?s best buddy or younger brother. Paramount or DreamWorks had hired him to costar with Reese Witherspoon. Warner Brothers offered him the title role in a new series of Batman movies, Miramax wanted him to play a transvestite sheriff in a sensitive drama about anti-gay bigotry in Texas circa 1890, and Universal hoped he would sign a ten-million-dollar deal for two films that he would also write and direct.
Evidently, in this new millennium and in the popular imagination of those who dwelt on the glamorous west side of L.A., no failure ever died young, and Death came early only to the famous, the rich, the adored. Call it the Princess Di Principle.
Whether the man who had killed Ray ?the Nerd? Rolf had also [201] been an actor on the brink of superstardom, no one knew for certain. The murderer?s name remained unknown, unmangled.
Indisputably, the killer himself had been gunned down. His body lay on the lawn in front of Rolf?s apartment house.
Two pairs of binoculars circulated among the onlookers. Corky borrowed one pair to study Rolf?s apparent executioner.
In the darkness and the rain, even with magnification, he was unable to discern any identifying details of the corpse sprawled on the grass.
Crime-scene investigators, busy with scientific instruments and cameras, crouched alongside the cadaver. In black raincoats draped like folded wings, they had the posture and the intensity of crows pecking at carrion.
In every version of the story viewed with credibility among the gossips, the killer himself had been killed by a police officer. The cop had been passing by in the street at the right moment, by sheer happenstance, or he had lived in Rolf?s building, or he?d come there to visit his girlfriend or his mother.
Whatever had occurred here this evening, Corky was reasonably confident that it would not compromise his plans or cause the police to turn a gimlet eye on him. He had kept his association with Reynerd secret from everyone he knew.
He believed that Reynerd had been likewise discreet. They had committed crimes together and had conspired to commit others. Neither of them had anything to gain-and much to lose-by revealing their relationship to anyone.
Stupid in uncounted ways, Rolf had not been entirely reckless. To impress a woman or his witless friends, he might wish to reveal that he?d had his mother killed by proxy or that he was partner to a murderous conspiracy involving the biggest movie star in the world, but he would never go that far. He would just invent a colorful lie.
Although Ethan Truman, incognito, had visited earlier this very [202] day, the possibility that Reynerd?s death was connected in any way to Channing Manheim and the six gifts in black boxes remained unlikely.
Being an apostle of anarchy, Corky understood that chaos ruled the world and that in the rough and disorderly jumble-tumble of daily events, meaningless coincidences like this frequently occurred. Such apparent synchronisms encouraged lesser men than he to see patterns, design, and meaning in life.
He had wagered his future and, in fact, his existence, on the belief that life was meaningless. He owned a lot of stock in chaos, and at this late date, he wasn?t going to second-guess his investment by selling chaos short.
Reynerd had fancied himself not only a potential movie star of historic proportions, but also something of a bad boy, and bad boys made enemies. For one thing, more in search of thrills than profits, he had dealt drugs to a refined list of entertainment-industry clients, mostly cocaine and meth and Ecstasy.
More likely than not, tougher men than pretty-boy Reynerd had decided that he was poaching in their fields. With a bullet in the head, he?d been discouraged from further competition.
Corky had needed Reynerd dead.
Chaos had obliged.
No more, no less.
Time to move on.
Time, in fact, for dinner. Aside from a candy bar in the car and a double latte at the mall, he had eaten nothing since breakfast.
On good days filled with worthwhile endeavors, his work provided nourishment enough, and he often skipped lunch. Now, after busy hours of useful enterprise, he was famished.
Nevertheless, he tarried long enough to serve chaos. The six children were a temptation that he could not resist.
All were six to eight years old. Some were better dressed for the [203] rain and the cold than others were, but all remained unflaggingly exuberant, dancing-playing-chasing in the nasty night, as though they were storm petrels born to wet wind and turbulent skies.
Focused on the hubbub of cops and ambulances, the adults stood oblivious of their offspring. The kids were wise enough to understand that as long as they played on the lawn behind their elders and kept their chatter below a certain volume, they could prolong their night adventure indefinitely.
In this paranoid age, a stranger dared not offer candy to any child. Even the most gullible among them would shriek for the cops at the offer of a lollipop.
Corky had no lollipops, but he traveled with a bag of luscious, chewy caramels.
He waited until the kids? attention turned elsewhere, whereupon he extracted the bag from a deep inner pocket of his slicker. He dropped it on the grass where the children were sure to find it when their games brought them in this direction again.
He hadn?t laced the candy with poison, but only with a potent hallucinogenic. Terror and disorder could be spread through society by means more subtle than extreme violence.
The amount of drug infused in each sweet morsel was small enough that even a child who greedily stuffed his face with six or eight of them would not risk toxic overdose. By the third piece, the waking nightmares would begin.
Corky mingled a while longer with the adults, surreptitiously observing the children, until two girls found the bag. Being girls, they at once generously shared the contents with the four boys.
This particular drug, unless taken in concert with a mellowing antidepressant like Prozac, was known to cause hallucinations so horrific that they tested the user?s sanity. Soon, the kids would believe that mouths, bristling with sharp teeth and serpent tongues, had opened in the earth to swallow them, that alien parasites were [204] bursting from their chests, and that everyone they knew and loved now intended to rend them limb from limb. Even after they recovered, flashbacks would trouble them for months, possibly for years.
Having sown these seeds of chaos, he returned to his car through the refreshingly cool night and cleansing rain.
If he had been born in an earlier century, Corky Laputa would have followed the original trail of Johnny Appleseed, killing one by one all the trees that the fabled orchardist had planted on this continent.