mere skill, not sorcery. 'What was your motive, Enoch?'
'My what?'
'You appear not to have had one. But there's always a motive, some self-interest being served. If there's an insurance policy, we'll track it down, and you'll fry like bacon on a hot skillet.' As usual, the cops voice was flat, a drone; he had delivered not an emotional threat, but a quiet promise.
Widening his eyes in calculated surprise, Junior said, 'Are you a police officer?'
The detective smiled. This was an anaconda smile, inspired by the contemplation of merciless strangulation. 'Before you woke, you were dreaming. Weren't you? A nightmare, apparently.
This sudden turn in the interrogation unnerved Junior. Vanadium had a talent for keeping a suspect off balance. A conversation with him was like a scene out of a movie about Robin Hood: a battle with cudgels on a slippery log bridge over a river. 'Yes. I? I'm still soaked with sweat.'
'What were you dreaming about, Enoch?'
No one could put him in prison because of his dreams. 'I can't remember. Those are the worst, when you're not able to remember them-don't you think? They're always so silly when you can recall the details. When you draw a blank? they seem more threatening.'
'You spoke a name in your sleep.'
More likely than not, this was a lie, and the detective was, setting him up. Suddenly Junior wished that he had denied dreaming.
Vanadium said, 'Bartholomew.'
Junior blinked and dared not speak, because he didn't know any Bartholomew, and now he was certain the cop was weaving an elaborate web of deceit, setting a trap. Why would he have spoken a name that meant nothing to him?
'Who is Bartholomew?' Vanadium asked.
Junior shook his head.
'You spoke that name twice.'
'I don't know anyone named Bartholomew.' He decided that the truth, in this instance, could not harm him.
'You sounded as though you were in a lot of distress. You were frightened of this Bartholomew.'
The ball of sodden Kleenex was gripped so tightly in Junior's left hand that had its carbon content been higher, it would have been compacted into a diamond. He saw Vanadium staring at his clenched fist and sharp white knuckles. He tried to ease up on the wad of Kleenex, but he wasn't able to relent.
Inexplicably, each repetition of Bartholomew heightened Junior's anxiety. The name resonated not just in his ear, but in his blood and bones, in body and mind, as if he were a great bronze bell and Bartholomew the clapper.
'Maybe he's a character I saw in a movie or read in a novel. I'm a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club. I'm always reading one thing or another. I don't remember a character named B-Bartholomew, but maybe I read the book years ago.'
Junior realized he was on the verge of babbling, and with an effort, he silenced himself.
Rising slowly like the blade in the hands of an ax murderer as deliberate as an accountant, Thomas Vanadium's gaze arced from Junior's clenched fist to his face.
The port-wine birthmark appeared to be darker than before and differently mottled than he remembered it.
If the policeman's gray eyes had earlier been as hard as nailheads, they were now points, and behind them was willpower strong enough to drive spikes through stone.
'My God,' Junior said, pretending that his befuddlement had faded and that his mind had just now clarified, 'you think Naomi was murdered, don't you?'
Instead of engaging in the confrontation for which he had been pressing ever since his first visit, Vanadium surprised Junior by breaking eye contact, turning from the bed, and crossing the room to the door.
'It's even worse,' Junior rasped, convinced that he was losing some indefinable advantage if the cop left without playing out this moment as it would usually unfold in an intellectual television crime drama like Perry Mason or Peter Gunn.
Stopping at the door without opening it, Vanadium turned to stare at Junior, but said nothing.
Leavening his tortured voice as best he could with shock and hurt, as though deeply wounded by the need to speak these words, Junior Cain said, 'You? you think I killed her, don't you? That's crazy.'
The detective raised both hands, palms toward Junior, fingers spread.
After a pause, he showed the backs of his hands-and then the palms once more.
For a moment, Junior was mystified. Vanadium's movements had the quality of ritual, vaguely reminiscent of a priest raising high the Eucharist.
Mystification slowly gave way to understanding. The quarter was gone.
Junior hadn't noticed when the detective stopped turning the coin across his knuckles.
'Perhaps you could pull it from your ear,' Thomas Vanadium suggested.
Junior actually raised his trembling left hand to his ear, expecting to find the quarter tucked in the auditory canal, held between the tragus and the antitragus, waiting to be plucked with a flourish.
His ear was empty.
'Wrong hand,' Vanadium advised.
Strapped to the bracing board, semi-immobilized to prevent the accidental dislodgement of the intravenous feed, Junior's right arm felt half numb, stiff from disuse.
The supplicant hand seemed not to be a part of him. As pale and exotic as a sea anemone, the long fingers curled as tentacles curl artfully around an anemone's mouth, poised to snare, lazily but relentlessly, any passing prize.
Like a disc fish with silvery scales, the coin lay in the cup of Junior's palm. Directly over his life line.
Disbelieving his eyes, Junior reached across his body with his left hand and picked up the quarter. Although it had been lying in his right palm, it was cold. Icy.
Miracles being nonexistent, the materialization of the quarter in his hand was nevertheless impossible. Vanadium had stood only at the left side of the bed. He had never leaned over Junior or reached across him.
Yet the coin was as real as dead Naomi broken on the stony ridge at the foot of the fire tower.
In a state of wonderment that was laced with dread rather than delight, he looked up from the quarter, seeking an explanation from Vanadium, expecting to see that anaconda smile.
The door was falling shut. With no more sound than the day makes when it turns to night, the detective had gone.
Chapter 18
Seraphim Aethionema White was nothing whatsoever like her name, except that she had as kind a heart and as good a soul as any among the hosts in Heaven. She did not have wings, as did the angels after which she had been named, and she couldn't sing as sweetly as the seraphim, either, for she had been blessed with a throaty voice and far too much humility to be a performer. Aethionema were delicate flowers, either pale-or rose-pink, and while this girl, just sixteen, was beautiful by any standard, she was not a delicate soul but a strong one, not likely to be shaken apart in even the highest wind.
Those who had just met her and those who were overly charmed by eccentricity called her Seraphim, her name complete. Her teachers, neighbors, and casual acquaintances called her Sera. Those who knew her best and loved her the most deeply-like her sister, Celestina called her Phimie.
From the moment the girl was admitted on the evening of January 5, the nurses at St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco called her Phimie, too, not because they knew her well enough to love her, but because that was the name they heard Celestina use.
Phimie shared Room 724 with an eighty-six-year-old woman Nella Lombardi-who had been deep in a stroke- induced coma for eight days and who had been recently moved out of the ICU when her condition stabilized. Her
