NEEDING SOME AIR, he pulled on a sportcoat and took the dim-lit stairs down through the Doge’s Apartments past all the usual nightly sounds of arguments and murmuring radios, and headed north toward Albert Kinney Pier.
Quiet tonight. The dancehall closed. The Ferris wheel, stilled and its lights dead, was a huge black spiderweb cast across the starlessly hazy night. Wrappers fluttered about his feet. The sigh of the Pacific came and went through the gaps in the pier’s boarding.
He leaned on the railing. As he rolled himself a cigarette and blew plumes of smoke into the darkness, he ran through possible explanations for the strange role which April Lamotte was asking him to perform. The one in which she’d killed Daniel Lamotte and he was helping to provide her with some kind of alibi bothered him the most. But, for all that April Lamotte was plainly a woman who was capable of many things, he just couldn’t believe that she’d murdered her husband. If his intuition, long-honed in dealing with worried spouses, told him anything at all about April Lamotte, it was that she was genuinely trying to sort her and her husband’s lives out. But was she telling him everything? His intuition also told him that most definitely she was not.
A cold prickle—the sort of thing you paid for when you went to the feelies, or got for free when someone walked over your grave—passed across him. He looked back along the pier. There was no one about. But, for an odd moment, something did seem to be moving towards him from amid the dark and empty attractions. Not quite a figure—its shape wouldn’t stay that clear. He had it down as simply some kind of dust devil, although he’d never seen such a thing before out here in Venice. Nothing but a stir of warmed air and darkness, it picked up swirls of beachsand and scraps of litter as it moved toward him with an odd quality of purpose. Certainly not a figure. Or if it was a figure, it was a ragged blur of scraps and shadows, the shape not of one figure but of many, and it was running towards him as if from out of the end of some incredibly long tunnel, and it was bringing with it an odd and breathy hissing.
He blinked, and the whole sensation faded. The wind stirred, and then there was nothing back down the pier but sea air and darkness. He put it down to the sound of the tide, and the breeze, and the loose fry wrappers blowing around him, and his tiredness, and seeing that wraith, and then Peg Entwistle in that feelie…
The light was off in Glory’s cubbyhole when he got back to the Doge’s Apartments. Most of the radios were off as well. Where the furniture creaked, where people cried out, it was to other rhythms.
He let himself in, undressed, climbed into bed. He lay there for a long while, staring up at the ceiling.