stood with her back pressed into a corner, wide-eyed and pale, too frightened yet to cry.
The air smelled of hot tomato sauce and onions. On the cutting board were sliced green peppers. The woman had been making dinner.
“Come on,” Roy said to Johnson.
Together, they searched the rest of the house, moving fast. The element of surprise was gone, but momentum was still on their side. Hall closet. Bathroom. Girl’s bedroom: teddy bears and dolls, the closet door standing open, nobody there. Another small room: a sewing machine, a half-finished green dress on a dressmaker’s dummy, closet packed full, no place for anyone to hide. Then the master bedroom, closet, closet, bathroom: nobody.
Johnson said, “Unless that’s him in a blond wig on the kitchen floor…”
Roy returned to the living room, where the guy in the lounge chair was tilted as far back as he could go, staring into the bore of the.44 while Cal Dormon screamed in his face, spraying him with spittle: “One more time. You hear me, asshole? I’m asking just one more time — where is he?”
“I told you,” the guy said, “Jesus, nobody’s here but us.”
“Where’s Grant?” Dormon insisted.
The man was shaking as if the Barcalounger was equipped with a vibrating massage unit. “I don’t know him, I swear, never heard of him. So will you just, will you just please, will you point that cannon somewhere else?”
Roy was saddened that it was so often necessary to deny people their dignity in order to get them to cooperate. He left Johnson in the living room with Dormon and returned to the kitchen.
The woman was still flat on the floor, with Vecchio’s knee in her back, but she was no longer trying to reach the butcher knife. She wasn’t calling him a bastard anymore, either. Fury having given way to fear, she was begging him not to hurt her little girl.
The child was in the corner, sucking on her thumb. Tears tracked down her cheeks, but she made no sound.
Roy picked up the butcher knife and put it on the counter, out of the woman’s reach.
She rolled one eye to look up at him. “Don’t hurt my baby.”
“We aren’t going to hurt anyone,” Roy said.
He went to the little girl, crouched beside her, and said in his softest voice, “Are you scared, honey?”
She turned her eyes from her mother to Roy.
“Of course, you’re scared, aren’t you?” he said.
With her thumb stuck in her mouth, sucking fiercely, she nodded.
“Well, there’s no reason to be scared of me. I’d never hurt a fly. Not even if it buzzed and buzzed around my face and danced in my ears and went skiing down my nose.”
The child stared solemnly at him through tears.
Roy said, “When a mosquito lands on me and tries to take a bite, do I swat him? Noooooo. I lay out a tiny napkin for him, a teeny tiny little knife and fork, and I say, ‘No one in this world should go hungry. Dinner’s on me, Mr. Mosquito.’”
The tears seemed to be clearing from her eyes.
“I remember one time,” Roy told her, “when this elephant was on his way to a supermarket to buy peanuts. He was in ever so great a hurry, and he just ran my car off the road. Most people, they would have followed that elephant to the market and punched him right on the tender tip of his trunk. But did I do that? Noooooo. ‘When an elephant is out of peanuts,’ I told myself, ‘he just can’t be held responsible for his actions.’ However, I must admit I drove to that market after him and let the air out of the tires on his bicycle, but that was not done in anger. I only wanted to keep him off the road until he’d had time to eat some peanuts and calm down.”
She was an adorable child. He wished he could see her smile.
“Now,” he said, “do you really think I’d hurt anyone?”
The girl shook her head: no.
“Then give me your hand, honey,” Roy said.
She let him take her left hand, the one without a wet thumb, and he led her across the kitchen.
Vecchio released the mother. The woman scrambled to her knees and, weeping, embraced the child.
Letting go of the girl’s hand and crouching again, touched by the mother’s tears, Roy said, “I’m sorry. I abhor violence, I really do. But we thought a dangerous man was here, and we couldn’t very well just knock and ask him to come out and play. You understand?”
The woman’s lower lip quivered. “I…I don’t know. Who are you, what do you want?”
“What’s your name?”
“Mary. Mary Z-Zelinsky.”
“Your husband’s name?”
“Peter.”
Mary Zelinsky had a lovely nose. The bridge was a perfect wedge, all the lines straight and true. Such delicate nostrils. A septum that seemed crafted of finest porcelain. He didn’t think he had ever seen a nose quite as wonderful before.
Smiling, he said, “Well, Mary, we need to know where he is.”
“Who?” the woman asked.
“I’m sure you know who. Spencer Grant, of course.”
“I don’t know him.”
Just as she answered him, he looked up from her nose into her eyes, and he saw no deception there.
“I’ve never heard of him,” she said.
To Vecchio, Roy said, “Turn the gas off under that tomato sauce. I’m afraid it’s going to burn.”
“I swear I’ve never heard of him,” the woman insisted.
Roy was inclined to believe her. Helen of Troy could not have had a nose any finer than Mary Zelinsky’s. Of course, indirectly, Helen of Troy had been responsible for the deaths of thousands, and many others had suffered because of her, so beauty was no guarantee of innocence. And in the tens of centuries since the time of Helen, human beings had become masters at the concealment of evil, so even the most guileless-looking creatures sometimes proved to be depraved.
Roy had to be sure, so he said, “If I feel you’re lying to me—”
“I’m not lying,” Mary said tremulously.
He held up one hand to silence her, and he continued where he had been interrupted:
“—I might take this precious girl to her room, undress her—”
The woman closed her eyes tightly, in horror, as if she could block out the scene that he was so delicately describing for her.
“—and there, among the teddy bears and dolls, I could teach her some grown-up games.”
The woman’s nostrils flared with terror. Hers really was an exquisite nose.
“Now, Mary, look me in the eyes,” he said, “and tell me again if you know a man named Spencer Grant.”
She opened her eyes and met his gaze.
They were face-to-face.
He put one hand on the child’s head, stroked her hair, smiled.
Mary Zelinsky clutched her daughter with pitiful desperation. “I swear to God I never heard of him. I don’t know him. I don’t understand what’s happening here.”
“I believe you,” he said. “Rest easy, Mary. I believe you, dear lady. I’m sorry it was necessary to resort to such crudity.”
Though the tone of his voice was tender and apologetic, a tide of rage washed through Roy. His fury was directed at Grant, who had somehow hoodwinked them, not at this woman or her daughter or her hapless husband in the Barcalounger.
Although Roy strove to repress his anger, the woman must have glimpsed it in his eyes, which were ordinarily of such a kindly aspect, for she flinched from him.
At the stove, where he had turned off the gas under the sauce and under a pot of boiling water as well, Vecchio said, “He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“I don’t think he ever did,” Roy said tightly.
