I prefer not to see him like this. The hard-driving rocker who sang
'Blue Suede Shoes' wears a cocky smile and even a sneer better than he does tears.
Karla Porter, Wyatt's wife, answered the door. Willowy, lovely, with eyes as green as lotus petals, she unfailingly projects an aura of serenity and quiet optimism that is in contrast with her husband's doleful face and mournful eyes.
I suspect Karla is the reason that Wyatt's job has not worn him down to total ruin. Each of us needs a source of inspiration in his life, a cause for hope, and Karla is Wyatt's.
'Oddie,' she said, 'what a pleasure to see you. Come in, come in. Wyatt is out back, getting ready to destroy some perfectly good steaks on the barbecue. We're having a few people to dinner, we've got plenty extra, so I hope you'll stay.'
As she led me through the house, unaware that Elvis accompanied us in a 'Heartbreak Hotel' mood, I said, 'Thank you, ma'am, that's very gracious of you, but I've got another engagement. I just stopped by to have a quick word with the chief.'
'He'll be delighted to see you,' she assured me. 'He always is.'
In the backyard, she turned me over to Wyatt, who was wearing an apron bearing the words burnt and greasy goes better with beer.
'Odd,' Chief Porter said, 'I hope you've not come here to ruin my evening.'
'That's not my intention, sir.'
The chief was tending to two grills-the first fired by gas for vegetables and ears of corn, the second by charcoal for the steaks.
With the sun still more than two hours above the horizon, a day of desert sunshine stored in the patio concrete, and visible waves of heat pouring off both barbecues, he should have been making enough salt water to reconstitute the long-dead sea of Pico Mundo. He was, however, as dry as the star of an antiperspirant commercial.
Over the years, I have seen Chief Porter sweat only twice. On the first occasion, a thoroughly nasty man was aiming a spear gun at the chief's crotch from a distance of just two feet, and the second occasion was much more unnerving than that.
Checking out the bowls of potato salad, corn chips, and fresh fruit salad on the picnic table, Elvis seemed to lose interest when he realized that no deep-fried banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches would be provided. He wandered off to the swimming pool.
After I declined a bottle of Corona, the chief and I sat in lawn chairs, and he said, 'You been communing with the dead again?'
'Yes, sir, off and on all day. But this isn't so much about who's dead as who might be soon.'
I told him about Fungus Man at the restaurant and later at Green Moon Mall.
'I saw him at the Grille,' the chief said, 'but he didn't strike me as suspicious, just… unfortunate.'
'Yes, sir, but you didn't have the advantage of being able to see his fan club.' I described the disturbing size of Fungus Man's bodach entourage.
When I recounted my visit to the small house in Camp's End, I pretended, rather ludicrously, that the side door had been standing open and that I had gone inside under the impression that someone might be in trouble. This relieved the chief of the need to conspire with me, after the fact, in the crime of breaking and entering.
'I'm not a high-wire artist,' he reminded me.
'No, sir.'
'You expect me to walk a dangerously narrow line sometimes.'
'I have great respect for your balance, sir.'
'Son, that sounds perilously like bullshit.'
'There's some bullshit in it, sir, but it's mostly sincerity'
Telling him what I found in the house, I omitted any mention of the black room and the traveling swarm. Even a man as sympathetic and open-minded as Wyatt Porter will become a skeptic if you force too much exotic detail upon him.
When I finished my story, the chief said, 'What's got your attention, son?'
'Sir?'
'You keep looking over toward the pool.'
'It's Elvis,' I explained. 'He's behaving strangely.'
'Elvis Presley is here? Now? At my house?'
'He's walking on the water, back and forth, and gesticulating.'
'Gesticulating?'
'Not rudely, sir, and not at us. He looks like he's arguing with himself. Sometimes I worry about him.'
Karla Wyatt reappeared, this time with their first two dinner guests in tow.
Bern Eckles, in his late twenties, was a recent addition to the Pico Mundo Police Department. He had been on the force just two months.
Lysette Rains, who specialized in false fingernails, was the assistant manager at the thriving beauty shop that Karla owned on Olive Street, around the corner and two blocks from where I worked at the Grille.
These two had not arrived as a couple, but I could see that the chief and Karla were engaged in some matchmaking.
Because he didn't know-and never would-about my sixth sense, Officer Eckles couldn't figure out what to make of me, and he had not yet decided whether he liked me. He couldn't understand why the chief always made time for me even on the busiest of days.
After the new arrivals had been served drinks, the chief asked Eckles to come to his study for a few minutes. 'I'll get on the computer to the DMV while you make some phone calls for me. We need to work up a quick profile on this odd duck from Camp's End.'
On his way into the house with the chief, Bern Eckles twice looked over his shoulder at me, frowning. Maybe he thought that in his absence I would try to make time with Lysette Rains.
When Karla returned to the kitchen, where she was working on the dessert, Lysette sat in the chair that the chief had occupied. With both hands, she held a glass of Coke spiked with orange vodka, from which she took tiny sips, licking her lips after each.
'How does that taste?' I wondered.
'Sort of like cleaning fluid with sugar. But sometimes I have a low energy level, and the caffeine helps.'
She was wearing yellow shorts and a frilly yellow blouse. She looked like a lemon cupcake with fancy icing.
'How's your mother these days, Odd?'
'Still colorful.'
'I would expect so. And your dad?'
'He's about to get rich quick.'
'What with this time?'
'Selling real estate on the moon.'
'How does that work?'
'You pay fifteen bucks, you get a deed to one square foot of the moon.'
'Your father doesn't own the moon,' Lysette said with the faintest note of disapproval.
She is a sweet person and reluctant to give offense even at evidence of flagrant fraud.
'No, he doesn't,' I agreed. 'But he realized that nobody else owned it, either, so he
