Eve Jammer listened patiently as the old woman rambled on about Hannah Rainey. Davidowitz was obviously talking
When the widow paused, a young-sounding man in the room with her asked a question about Hannah. Before Davidowitz answered, she called her visitor “my pretty-eyed snookie-wookums” and asked him to “give me a kissie, come on, give me a little lick, show Theda you love her, you little sweetums, sweet little sweetums, yeah, that’s right, shake that tail and give Theda a little lick, a little kissie.”
“Good God,” Eve said, grimacing with disgust. Davidowitz was going on eighty. From the sound of him, the man with her was forty or fifty years her junior. Sick. Sick and perverted. What was the world coming to?
“A cockroach,” Theda said as she gently rubbed Rocky’s tummy. “Big. About four or five feet long, not counting the antennae.”
After the Drug Enforcement Administration raided Hannah Rainey’s place with a force of eight agents and discovered that she’d already fled, they grilled Theda and other neighbors for hours, asking the dumbest questions, all those grown men insisting Hannah was a dangerous criminal, when anyone who had ever met the precious girl for five minutes knew she was
Later that same evening, long after the Keystone Kops had departed — such a loud, rude group of nitwits — Theda went to 2-D with the spare key that Hannah had given her. Instead of breaking down the door to get into the apartment, the DEA had smashed the big window in the dining area that overlooked the balcony and courtyard. The landlord already had boarded over the window with sheets of plywood, until the glazier could fix it. But the front door was intact, and the lock hadn’t been changed, so Theda let herself in. The apartment — unlike Theda’s own — was rented furnished. Hannah had always kept it spotless, treated the furniture as though it were her own, a fastidious and
“Not well drawn, you understand, more or less just the outline of a cockroach, but you could see what it was meant to be,” Theda said. “Just a sort of line drawing but ugly all the same. What on earth were those nitwits trying to prove, scrawling on the walls?”
Spencer was pretty sure that Hannah-Valerie herself had drawn the cockroach — just as she had nailed the textbook photograph of a roach to the wall of the bungalow in Santa Monica. He sensed it was meant to taunt and aggravate the men who had come looking for her, though he had no idea what it signified or why she knew that it would anger her pursuers.
Sitting at her desk in her windowless jurisdiction, Eve Jammer telephoned the operations office, upstairs, on the ground floor of the Las Vegas quarters of Carver, Gunmann, Garrote & Hemlock. The morning duty officer was John Cottcole, and Eve alerted him to the situation at Theda Davidowitz’s apartment.
Cottcole was electrified by the news and unable to conceal his excitement. He was shouting orders to people in his office even while he was still on the line with Eve.
“Ms. Jammer,” Cottcole said, “I’ll want a copy of that disc, every word on that disc, you understand?”
“Sure,” she said, but he hung up even as she was replying.
They thought that Eve didn’t know who Hannah Rainey had been before becoming Hannah Rainey, but she knew the whole story. She also knew that there was an enormous opportunity for her in that case, a chance to hasten the growth of her fortune and power, but she hadn’t quite yet decided how to exploit it.
A fat spider scurried across her desk.
She slammed one hand down, crushing the bug against her palm.
Driving back to Spencer Grant’s cabin in Malibu, Roy Miro opened the Tupperware container. He needed the mood boost that the sight of Guinevere’s treasure was sure to give him.
He was shocked and dismayed to see a bluish-greenish-brownish spot of discoloration spreading from the web between the first and second fingers. He hadn’t expected anything like that for
Although he told himself that the spot of corruption was small, that the rest of the hand was still exquisite, that he should focus more on the unchanged and perfect form of it than on the coloration, Roy could not rekindle his previous passion for Guinevere’s treasure. In fact, though it didn’t yet emit a foul odor, it wasn’t a treasure any longer: It was just garbage.
Deeply saddened, he put the lid on the plastic box.
He drove another couple of miles before pulling off Pacific Coast Highway and parking in the lot at the foot of a public pier. But for his sedan, the lot was empty.
Taking the Tupperware container with him, he got out of the car, climbed the steps to the pier, and walked toward the end.
His footsteps echoed hollowly off the boardwalk. Under those tightly set beams, breakers rolled between the pilings, rumbling and sloshing.
The pier was deserted. No fishermen. No young lovers leaning against the railing. No tourists. Roy was alone with his corrupted treasure and with his thoughts.
At the end of the pier he stood for a moment, gazing at the vast expanse of glimmering water and at the azure heavens that curved down to meet it at the far horizon. The sky would be there tomorrow and a thousand years from tomorrow, and the sea would roll eternally, but all else passed away.
He strove to avoid negative thoughts. It wasn’t easy.
He opened the Tupperware container and threw the five-fingered garbage into the Pacific. It disappeared into the golden spangles of sunlight that gilded the backs of the low waves.
He wasn’t concerned that his fingerprints might be lifted by laser from the pallid skin of the severed hand. If the fish didn’t eat that last bit of Guinevere, the salt water would scrub away evidence of his touch.
He tossed the Tupperware container and its lid into the sea as well, although he was stricken with a pang of guilt even as the two objects arced toward the waves. He was usually sensitive to the environment, and he never littered.
He was not concerned about the hand, because it was organic. It would become a part of the ocean, and the ocean would not be changed.
Plastic, however, would take more than three hundred years to completely disintegrate. And throughout that period, toxic chemicals would leach from it into the suffering sea.
He should have dumped the Tupperware in one of the trash cans that stood at intervals along the pier railing.
Well. Too late. He was human. That was always the problem.
For a while Roy leaned against the railing. He stared into an infinity of sky and water, brooding about the human condition.
As far as Roy was concerned, the saddest thing in the world was that human beings, for all their ardent striving and desire, could never achieve physical, emotional, or intellectual perfection. The species was doomed to imperfection; it thrashed forever in despair or denial of that fact.
Though she had been undeniably attractive, Guinevere had been perfect in only one regard. Her hands.
Now those were gone too.
Even so, she had been one of the fortunate, because the vast majority of people were imperfect in
