Judas Horse

cop shows or a movie from Dick Stone’s collection of tapes. He has become obsessed with Apocalypse Now.

Also, he has begun to get in shape.

Stone is jogging ten miles in the mornings, a major change, which gets my attention. Offenders have rituals. They will alter their looks, get high, call Mom, or rob a store before they’re ready to go out and execute a major crime.

Like the Big One.

Along with a dedicated running schedule, he has been screening this movie regularly — once or twice a week — all of us saying the dialogue out loud like a gospel choir. Stone is as fussy about his tapes as Megan is about the candy dishes — he always keeps Apocalypse Now on the fourth bookshelf, at eye level, between The Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver.

One day, I noticed his favorite cassette was missing. It stayed missing for seventy-two hours; then it was back in the same place. Had he lent it? Is he playing with my head?

The sewing room is a drafty screened-in porch with tilting bamboo shades and bolts of discount cloth infested with earwigs. I call it the “Room of Unfinished Dreams.” An old Singer sewing machine is the island in the storm, black lace panties caught in its teeth, as Sara comes in here to sew her samples of lingerie — original designs that she claims she’ll sell one day to big department stores. There’s a dressing table with a big round mirror, drawers stuffed with Megan’s bags of yarn. The white cat likes the rattan love seat in the morning sun.

Lying in bed at night, I float inside my head like a dreamer to the upper limits of the sewing room, recollecting that the dropped ceiling tile showed no signs of removal (for illicit storage in the space above); then my inner eye travels up the stairs, past the German wall clock, to Stone and Megan’s bedroom, and the mondo mess of pills and herbal remedies in the master bath — including the heavy-duty antipsychotics Mellaril and Haldol, and benzodiazepines for anxiety, Ativan and Librium. It would be excellent to trace the doctor who wrote the prescriptions, but they are all generic, from Mexico. Megan, who did a stint as an aide in a psychiatric facility, has apparently been playing amateur shrink with Dick Stone’s brain.

Every day, I inspect Slammer’s room, the outbuildings, and of course the attic, and in every night’s review so far, this aging Victorian dame of a farmhouse has convinced me that she has herself in order — nothing wanton, nothing to hide.

The only place I have yet to search is Dick Stone’s locked workshop.

I was in there only once, on the pretext of going down to the basement to get laundry detergent.

Megan had been working on her quilt. A Christian station played on the radio. Megan likes that because it reminds her of her childhood. She was the eldest of five, growing up in an austere minister’s home in snowy northern Michigan. All the other siblings took up charitable work. One of her sisters was killed on a mission to Africa, but Megan doesn’t say how.

The large frame that holds the quilt barely leaves enough space for a couple of hanging bicycles and metal shelves with household supplies — canned food and bleach. In an L-shaped room beyond, they have installed an industrial stove for the seasonal chore of making hazelnut brittle.

It was damp in the basement and Megan was wearing a plum red shawl over an Indian blouse with fringes at the hem, a peaceful look on her face as she sewed patches on the quilt. I noticed a glass and half-empty bottle of wine on the floor. The door to Stone’s shop was open, yellow light spilling out. It was almost romantic to imagine them on winter nights, pursuing their rustic hobbies side by side.

I filled the canister from a bin of laundry detergent, then wandered over to the woodworking shop, where Stone was applying lacquer to a cross section of tree trunk perched on a pair of sawhorses.

“What are you making?”

“A table.”

“What kind of wood is that?”

“Douglas fir.”

“It looks like marble.”

Quickly, I advanced through the doorway, sucking in the details like an alien invader: Table saw. Drill press. High window at ground level. Built-in cabinets, home-improvement clutter.

“Thirty coats of varnish. That’s how I get it to look like marble.” Jars, tiny drawers of screws and nails; pliers, drills, drill bits, chisels. A pair of steel storage cabinets with a padlock.

“The grain is beautiful. How do you know where to cut it?” “You have to read the wood.” He dragged a blackened fingertip across the polished slab. “See that darkness? That’s when the tree began to die.” I saw a black cloud, like a squirt of ink, spreading V-like through the amber rings of growth.

“That’s death. You’re looking at it,” Dick Stone said.

He keeps the guns in the locked cabinets.

At that moment, in the workshop fragrant with cedar dust and hard work, he could almost pass for exactly what he seemed: a hazelnut farmer with eager, skilled hands, awed by the inevitability of nature.

But then I saw the videocassette of Apocalypse Now on the workbench. I was certain I had just seen it, moments before, upstairs.

“You must really like that video to have two copies.”

Dick Stone said briefly, “It’s the greatest movie ever made.”

I cannot get into the workshop again until one rare morning when they’ve all gone into town and Dick Stone has left for a run. I wait fifteen minutes after he’s gone, and then hustle down the basement steps, clutching the set of lock picks delivered earlier by an FBI agent posing as a U.S. postal worker. In undercover school at Quantico, we ran time tests for defeating dead bolts; Stone’s workout has handed me at least an hour.

It takes only five minutes to blow Operation Wildcat sky-high.

Twenty-three

Inserting a tension wrench into the keyhole of the cylinder and then alternating several picks, I finally find the one with the right angle to lift each pin. The plug rotates and the lock opens.

The door to Dick Stone’s woodshop swings wide. I hesitate, as if someone is waiting in ambush. Sterling McCord, maybe. He has a way of appearing when you least expect him. But there is nothing. Dead air. I pull out a penlight and aim it at the floor.

As the light passes the legs of the sawhorse that holds the fir table, a wastebasket flips, and brown mice scatter. The scent of orange peel rises from the garbage. I right the wastebasket. My heart is racing and I have to pee. The smell of resin and lacquer in the enclosed space is dizzying.

I seriously hope there are no more mice.

The cone of light walks up the tall steel cabinet and stops at the padlock that secures the handles. This one is a common tumbler lock, using wafers instead of pins, and can be picked the same way. I’m getting good at this. The tumbler clicks and the hasp slides open.

Alone at the bottom of the quiet house, I insert the penlight between my teeth and open the cabinet doors, anxious to reveal Stone’s secret arsenal — expecting to find the sniper rifle, automatic weapons, Tovex explosives.

Instead, I am looking at a four-split television monitor.

In each corner of the screen is a different view of the empty house: living room, kitchen, sewing room, stairs.

It is an arsenal all right: a sophisticated wireless surveillance system, including a high-sensitivity receiver, whip antenna, and down converter.

Before I can begin to think of a way to cover up this horrendous breach of Stone’s security system, I notice the cassette of Apocalypse Now is resting on the upper shelf of the cabinet. I know he loves the movie, but why hide it in here?