ancient eras when the first gasping amphibians had crawled out of the sea onto the shore. Here was proof that he was not merely devolving, that his body was not merely struggling to express all the potential in the genetic heritage of humankind; here was proof that his genetic structure had run amok and that it was conveying him toward a form and consciousness that had nothing to do with the human race. He was becoming something
Henceforth, when he glanced in the mirror, he would be certain that it provided a view only of the roadway behind and revealed no slightest aspect of his own altered countenance.
He switched on the headlights and drove away from the rest area onto the highway.
The steering wheel felt odd in his malformed, monstrous hands. Driving, which should have been as familiar to him as walking, seemed like a singularly exotic act — and difficult, too, almost beyond his capabilities. He clutched the wheel and concentrated on the rainy highway ahead.
The whispering tires and metronomic thump of the windshield wipers seemed to pull him on through the storm and the gathering darkness, toward a special destiny. Once, when his full intellect returned to him for a brief moment, he thought of William Butler Yeats and remembered a fitting scrap of the great man's poetry:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
32
FLAMINGO PINK
Tuesday afternoon, after their meeting with Dr. Easton Solberg at UCI, Detectives Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom, still on sick leave, had driven to Tustin, where the main offices of Shadway Realty were located in a suite on the ground floor of a three-story Spanish-style building with a blue tile roof. Julio had spotted the stakeout car on the first pass. It was an unmarked muck-green Ford, sitting at the curb half a block from Shadway Realty, where the occupants had a good view of those offices and of the driveway that serviced the parking lot alongside the building. Two men in blue suits were in the Ford: One was reading a newspaper and the other was keeping watch.
“Feds,” Julio said as he cruised by the stakeout.
“Sharp's men? DSA?” Reese wondered.
“Must be.”
“A little obvious, aren't they?”
“I guess they don't really expect Shadway to turn up here,” Julio said. “But they have to go through the motions.”
Julio parked half a block behind the stakeout, putting several cars between him and the DSA's Ford, so it was possible to watch the watchers without being seen.
Reese had participated in scores of stakeouts with Julio, and surveillance duty had never been the ordeal it might have been with another partner. Julio was a complex man whose conversation was interesting hour after hour. But when one or both of them did not feel up to conversation, they could sit through long silences in comfort, without awkwardness — one of the surest tests of friendship.
Tuesday afternoon, while they watched the watchers and also watched the offices of Shadway Realty, they talked about Eric Leben, genetic engineering, and the dream of immortality. That dream was by no means Leben's private obsession. A deep longing for immortality, for commutation of the death sentence, had surely filled humankind since the first members of the species had acquired self-awareness and a crude intelligence. The subject had a special poignancy for Reese and Julio because both had witnessed the deaths of much-loved wives and had never fully recovered from their losses.
Reese could sympathize with Leben's dream and even understand the scientist's reasons for subjecting himself to a dangerous genetic experiment. It had gone wrong, yes: the two murders and the hideous crucifixion of the one dead girl were proof that Leben had come back from the grave as something less than human, and he must be stopped. But the deadly result of his experiments — and the folly of them — did not entirely foreclose sympathy. Against the rapacious hunger of the grave, all men and women were united, brothers and sisters.
As the sunny summer day grew dreary under an incoming marine layer of ash-gray clouds, Reese felt a cloak of melancholy settle upon him. He might have been overwhelmed by it if he had not been on the job, but he
They — like the DSA stakeout team — were not expecting Shadway to arrive at his headquarters, but they were hoping to identify one of the real-estate agents operating out of the office. As the afternoon wore on they saw several people entering and leaving the premises, but one tall, thin woman with a Betty Boop cap of black hair was the most noticeable, her angular storklike frame emphasized by a clinging flamingo-pink dress. Not pale pink, not frilly pink, but bold flame-hot pink. She came and went twice, both times chauffeuring middle-aged couples who had arrived at the office in their own cars — evidently clients for whom she was tracking down suitable houses. Her own car, with its personalized license plate — requeen, which most likely stood for Real Estate Queen — was a new canary-yellow Cadillac Seville with wire wheels, as memorable as the woman herself.
“That one,” Julio said when she returned to the office with the second couple.
“Hard to lose in traffic,” Reese agreed.
At 4:50, she had again come out of the Shadway Realty door and had hurried like a scurrying bird for her car. Julio and Reese had decided that she was probably going home for the day. Leaving the DSA stakeout to its fruitless wait for Benjamin Shadway, they followed the yellow Cadillac down First Street to Newport Avenue and north to Cowan Heights. She lived in a two-story stucco house with a shake-shingle roof and lots of redwood balconies and decking on one of the steeper streets in the Heights.
Julio parked in front as the pink lady's Caddy disappeared behind the closing garage door. He got out of the car to check the contents of the mailbox — a federal crime — in hope of discovering the woman's name. A moment later he got back into the car and said, “Theodora Bertlesman. Apparently goes by the name Teddy, because that was on one of the letters.”
They waited a couple of minutes, then went to the house, where Reese rang the bell. Summer wind, warm in spite of the winter-gray sky from which it flowed, breathed through surrounding bougainvillea, red-flowered hibiscus, and fragrant star jasmine. The street was still, peaceful, the sounds of the outside world eliminated by the most effective filter known to man — money.
“Should've gotten into real estate, I think,” Reese said. “Why on earth did I ever want to be a cop?”
“You were probably a cop in a previous life,” Julio said dryly, “in another century when being a cop was a better scam than selling real estate. You just fell into the same pattern this time around, without realizing things had changed.”
“Caught in a karma loop, huh?”
A moment later, the door opened. The stork-tall woman in the flamingo-pink dress looked down at Julio, then only slightly up at Reese, and she was less birdlike and more impressive close up than she had been from a distance. Earlier, watching her from the car, Reese had not been able to see the porcelain clarity of her skin, her startling gray eyes, or the sculpted refinement of her features. Her Betty Boop hair, which had looked lacquered — even ceramic — from fifty yards, now proved to be thick and soft. She was no less tall, no less thin, and no less flamboyant than she had seemed before, but her chest was certainly not flat, and her legs were lovely.
“May I help you?” Teddy Bertlesman asked. Her voice was low and silken. She radiated such an air of quiet self-assurance that if Julio and Reese had been two dangerous men instead of two cops, they might not have dared try anything with her.
Presenting his ID and badge, Julio introduced himself and said, “This is my partner, Detective Hagerstrom,” and explained that they wanted to question her about Ben Shadway. “Maybe my information is out of date, but I believe you work as a sales agent in his firm.”
“Of course, you know perfectly well that I do,” she said without scorn, even with some amusement. “Please come in.”
