Murder of Angels (34 page)

Somewhere in the darkness below him, Theda giggles, and Walter swallows hard, swallowing so he won’t puke, and stares back at the red witch watching him from the bottom of the stairs. “So…which does that make me?” he asks her, and she smiles, a sad and secretive smile, and then she squeezes the trigger again.

W
hen there is finally nothing else left for him to do, Marvin goes upstairs and sits alone on the big bed in Niki and Daria’s room. Nothing left to do, because all the necessary phone calls have been made, and all the necessary questions have been answered for policemen and relatives and friends, all the questions for now. He knows that there will be more later on. Reporters for the
Chronicle
and the
Guardian, Rolling Stone
and
The Advocate,
having failed to get their answers from Daria’s management or the record label, have all been politely told that she’s presently unavailable for comment and no, he has nothing to say himself. Which isn’t the truth, of course. After the long hours searching for Niki and then the trip to the morgue to identify her body, he has a lot to say, but they’re all words that will have to be saved for Daria and his therapist.

The Peruvian lilies in the Dresden-blue vase on the table beside the bed have begun to wilt, most of the coral-colored petals gone limp and starting to curl in on themselves, the heads of the flowers drooping, and he thinks that he should have replaced them two days ago. Back in that lost world where he worried about wilting flowers and groceries and whether or not Niki had taken her medication. Back in
that
world, there were never wilting flowers in the big house on Alamo Square.

Outside, the sun has set, and night lies heavy across the city; there’s no light in the bedroom but the yellow-orange streetlight getting in through the window facing Steiner Street, and occasionally the glare of headlights from a passing car.

Marvin has taken down the Ophelia print from its hook above the bed, and now the heavy frame is leaning against the opposite wall. Millais’
Ophelia,
her eyes and arms spread submissively towards an unwelcoming Heaven, the painting like a sick and self-fulfilling prophecy, and he almost threw it out the window half an hour ago, imagined it hitting the sidewalk in a violent crash of breaking glass and splintering wood, a perfectly empty act of exorcism, expurgation come much too late to save anyone at all. So he set it against the wall, instead, and covered it with a clean sheet from the linen closet down the hall. Tomorrow, he thinks, he’ll put it out for the garbage men to take away.

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that is for thoughts.

The antiseptic and dead people stink of the morgue still lingering thick in Marvin’s sinuses, and there’s no point trying not to see her lying there. Niki’s broken body stretched out on a sliding, stainless-steel tray, the cold air spilling out of the refrigerated compartment set into a long wall of identical compartments. Neat rows of doors closed on other, waiting corpses, and nothing in the world could ever have prepared him for the sight of her. Not his fears nor the things that the white-coated coroner’s assistant had told him. Her mottled gray skin and battered face and the damage that the fish and crabs had done, the black holes that had been her eyes, the cruel slashes left by the hooked beaks of scavenging gulls.

“But I
just
saw her, I mean, I saw her just last night,” he said, confused and horrified that this pathetic thing was really all that remained of Niki, that a human body could be reduced to such a wreck of rotting meat so quickly. He turned away then, because there was nothing else he needed to see, nothing else he needed to be sure of, and in a moment he would be crying again.

“I’m very sorry,” the man in the white lab coat said calmly, his voice wrapped with enough detachment and practiced sympathy to show that he’d seen this bad before, much worse than this, and he couldn’t really afford to be very sorry every time.

And then there were forms to sign, and there would have to be an autopsy, Marvin was told, because she was a suicide. Niki always said that she didn’t want an autopsy or embalming, that the thought of someone cutting up her dead body, draining all her blood and pumping her full of toxic chemicals was frightening and repulsive. But he didn’t argue. If she hadn’t wanted an autopsy, she shouldn’t have jumped off the goddamn Bay Bridge. After the morgue was finally done with him, Marvin answered questions for a homicide detective who gave him lukewarm coffee in a paper cup, coffee with sugar and nondairy creamer that he only sipped once and then set aside.

Marvin stares for a few minutes at the sunflower-yellow sheet covering
Ophelia,
then turns his head and stares at the bedroom window.
Daria should be here,
he thinks for the hundredth or thousandth time that day.
Daria should be here, because this is where Niki would want her to be.

Because this is where Niki
needed
her to be.

But Daria’s on her way to Alabama, chasing Niki’s ghosts.

The darkness outside the window makes him nervous, the night or something the night signifies, and Marvin goes back to staring at the draped Millais.

Her clothes spread wide, and mermaidlike awhile they bore her up…

“I didn’t know it would be so bad,” Marvin told the homicide detective, sitting in a hard, plastic chair in a tiny, cluttered office that smelled of cigarette smoke and bad coffee, speaking through the exhaustion and fog settling in around his head. “I’ve never seen anyone who drowned before.”

“She didn’t drown,” the detective said, drumming on his desk with the eraser end of a pencil. “She fell more than two hundred feet before she hit the water. Do you have any idea how hard water
is
on the other end of a fall like that? She might as well have hit concrete.”

And no, Marvin said, it wasn’t anything he’d ever thought about before, nothing he’d ever had any reason to think about, and he wanted to ask the detective to please stop drumming with his pencil.

“You watched after Miss Ky for a long time, didn’t you, Mr. Gale?”

And it took Marvin a moment or two to realize that the cop was talking to him, because no one ever calls him Mr. Gale. “Yeah,” he replied, trying to remember just how long it had been since Daria had hired him. “A couple of years,” he said finally. “They’d just bought the house.”

“And before Miss Ky, you were taking care of a girl named…” and the detective paused to read something from a file lying open in front of him.

“Sylvia,” Marvin volunteered. “I was taking care of a girl named Sylvia Thayer.”

“That’s right,” the detective said, leaning far back in his chair, watching Marvin from beneath his thin gray eyebrows. “Sylvia Thayer. She killed herself, too, didn’t she? Cut her throat with glass from a broken window.”

“It was a broken mirror. Is it time for me to talk to my lawyer?” he asked, even though he didn’t have a lawyer to talk to.

“No, I don’t think that will be necessary,” the detective said, “not yet, anyway,” and he leaned forward again. He smiled, nothing at all sincere in that smile, but at least he’d quit drumming the pencil against his desk. “I just try to keep an eye out for coincidences like that. Sometimes it’s all about noticing the coincidences.”

Marvin thinks about going back downstairs and fixing himself a drink, gin or brandy or bourbon, something strong enough to put him down until morning, or at least until the next time the phone rings. Maybe, if he looks hard enough, he could find the same strength that Daria seems to find in a bottle. Maybe he could find enough strength to face the things he’ll have to do tomorrow.

Maybe then he could stop thinking about Danny Boudreaux and Spyder Baxter and all the things that Niki told him about Birmingham. Maybe he could stop thinking about Sylvia Thayer and her wolves that no one else could see. And the spiders that fell from the sky to blanket Alamo Square while he was asleep in a hotel room on Steuart Street, while Niki was walking alone across the Bay Bridge, or as she fell, or after she hit the water like someone tumbling two hundred feet into a concrete wall.

Instead, he lies down on the bed, the comforter that still smells like her, wishing there were any tears left in him, because crying would be better than nothing at all. And in just a little while, he’s asleep.

“
That’s
right, birdeen,” the fat man in a tattered justau-corps and a crimson brocade vest says. “Let it
all
out,” and Niki obediently pukes up another gout of seawater and bile onto the listing deck of the little ship. She’s on her hands and knees, like someone bowing to the wide mizzen-sail fluttering in the night wind.

“You’d think she done gone and swallowed the whole bless’d ocean,” the man laughs, and Scarborough Pentecost coughs and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. His ponytail has come down, and his hair hangs in wet tendrils about his face.

“It’s not an easy trick,” he replies hoarsely. “Takes practice, and then it’s
still
not an easy trick.”

“Ah now, drowning’s easy,” the man in the red vest says and pats Niki on the back. “The sea, she makes it easy. I think it flatters her, mostly.”

And Niki spits and stares up at the fat man dressed like a threadbare storybook pirate, lost in a tide of déjà vu so strong that she momentarily forgets about the pain in her throat and chest, until it passes, leaving her even more disoriented than before.

“Who the hell
are
you?” she croaks, and the man gnaws a yellowed thumbnail for a moment before he answers her.

“Me? Why, I’m the damn fool cabbagehead what ought to have better sense than to get hisself mixed up with the likes of you two, that’s who
I
am,” and he jabs himself in the chest with one finger.

Niki looks uncertainly at Scarborough, and then she vomits again. When she’s done, she sits up on her knees, heels to ass, and “Did he just save our lives or something?” she asks.

“You might say that,” Scarborough replies. “Esme paid him to be at the coordinates where the portal opened.”

“Oh,” Niki says, though she really has no idea what Scarborough’s talking about. One moment they were in the fish augur’s collapsing chamber and then he was pulling her down into icy black water. And there’s nothing much after that, nothing but fading hints of dream, until she came to on the deck of the barque.

“You can call me Malim, if you’re the sort what gotta go calling people by names,” the man in the red vest says. “I suppose it’s too much to be expectin’ a
hierophant
to be callin’ me Captain.”

“He’s a smuggler,” Scarborough adds, and coughs again.

“Ah, now. Listen, boy. Don’t make it sound like a shameful thing,” Malim says and frowns dramatically.

“You mean the way you just said ‘hierophant’?” Niki asks.

“Yeah, somethin’ like that,” Malim replies and scratches at the scraggly billy-goat beard perched on the end of his chin. He turns and looks towards the ship’s stern and a red-orange glow staining the horizon. “Some words, there just ain’t no way to get around the taint of ’em.”

“You’ll have to excuse him, Vietnam,” Scarborough says and shakes his head. “Malim’s a useful old fucker, and he won’t stab you in the back—well,
most
of the time, he won’t stab you in the back—but he’s not much for prophecies and messiahs.”

“Prophecies,”
Malim snorts and tugs at his beard. “Padnée’s a blazin’ inferno, thanks to that one there,” and he points at Niki. “And I don’t need no magics to tell me she’s gonna get a lot of folks killed ’fore she’s done. She’s got that awful shine about her.”

“Padnée’s burning?” Niki whispers, wondering how long she was out, how long since the first cannonball hit the ramparts, how long since the cold and the dark.

“See for yourself, birdeen,” Malim says and holds out a pudgy hand to her. Niki’s stomach gurgles loudly and cramps, and she waits a moment before trying to stand, waiting to be sure that she isn’t going to puke again.

“You go round talkin’ revolution and uprisin’, you start gettin’ people killed, cities burnt down, all sorts of shit like that.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Niki insists, taking his hand and letting him pull her to her feet, her knees so wobbly she wants to sit right back down again. “All I did was jump off a bridge.”

“Now, is that so,” Malim sneers and goes back to staring at the fiery glow where the sea meets the night sky. “Well, then maybe someone needs to be tellin’ that to the Dragon, ’cause he seems to have gotten the wrong impression altogether.”

“I didn’t do that,” Niki says very quietly, and she leans against the aftermast, because she’s pretty sure her legs have gone too weak to hold her up. “Scarborough, please tell me I didn’t do that.”

Malim raises one beetling eyebrow and looks down at Scarborough. “It’s sure a strange sort of savior you got yourself here, Mr. Pentecost. Me, I ’spected someone with a little more steel in her gut.”

“How about
you
just stick a goddamn sock in it,” Scarborough growls at Malim and stumbles slowly to his feet. “You didn’t
do
it, Vietnam, but I’m afraid you’re the reason it’s been
done
.”

“They’re all dead?”

“Yeah,” Scarborough says. “Well, most of them.” Then the ship rolls to port, and he almost loses his balance and sits down quickly on a small barrel marked
OIL
:
DO NOT DRINK
. He covers his face with both hands and rubs at his temples. “Jesus, I fucking hate boats,” he moans.

“Because of
me
. All those people, all of them are dead because of me.”

“By Dagon’s left testicle,” Malim grunts, grinning a broad grin to show off a mouthful of teeth the color of walnut shells, and he puts an arm around Niki. “This is rich as sow’s milk churned to butter, it is. I wouldn’t ’ave missed this for the world. What in blue blazes did you
think,
missy? That maybe that old serpent was just gonna roll over, pretty as you please, and show you where to stick your shiv?”