Besides that all secret men are men soon terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to justify the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
DR. ARMENTROUT KNEW HE was lucky to have got out of the smoky apartment building and back down to the street, and his car, and to Long John Beach, before encountering this … very shifty woman.
The day had started propitiously, but this last half hour had been a rout.
Late last Thursday his teal-blue BMW had finally limped off the 280 at Junipero Serra Boulevard and sputtered up Seventh to Parnassus to the UCSF Medical Center, where he had got a couple of colleagues to make some telephone calls for him; the upshot was that he had been allowed to take over house-sitting duties at the nearby Twin Peaks villa of a neurologist who was on sabbatical in Europe.
The first thing he had done at the empty house was to change the phone-answering message. Then, very quickly, he had made a photocopied blank sheet of letterhead from the nearby Pacifica minimum-security psychiatric facility, and he’d altered the phone and fax numbers on it to those of the absent neurologist’s house; he had addressed the sheet to Rosecrans Medical, and typed on it a transfer for Long John Beach, along with a request for Beach’s records—to make it look plausible he had had to ask for everything: nursing progress reports, psychosocial assessment, treatment plan, financial data, the legal section. He hoped the neurologist was in the habit of keeping a lot of paper in his home fax printer. Long John Beach was 53-58, on a full conservatorship, but the old man’s “conservator” had been a fictitious entity from the start, so there’d been no risk in signing the remembered made-up name.
Then Armentrout had telephoned Rosecrans Medical and peremptorily announced his application for immediate administrative leave. He’d explained that he was temporarily working as a consultant at UCSF Medical, and pointed out that he was entitled to six weeks a year of vacation, and had never taken any of it. He had named one of the other doctors, an elderly Freudian, to serve as acting chief of staff in his absence. Nobody had argued with him, as he had known they would not—a chief of psychiatry could pretty well do as he liked in a clinic.
To his surprise, he had felt bad about violating their trust, breaking the rules—and not just because he would lose his career and probably be charged with a felony if he were to be caught. He had pursued a psychiatric career largely out of gratitude for his own long-ago deliverance from guilt and shame, and he regretted the necessity of this dishonesty far more than he had ever regretted the killing of a patient.
While waiting vainly to hear from Plumtree’s Omar Salvoy personality on the cellular telephone, Armentrout had printed up a flyer and posted it in various bars and surf shops and parks around the city; REWARD FOR INFORMATION, the flyer had read, followed by a picture of Koot Hoomie Parganas—an old school photo, the same one that had been on billboards in Los Angeles when the boy had dropped out of sight in ’92—and one of Angelica Anthem Elizalde, also from that year, blown up from a newspaper photo, and unfortunately showing her with her mouth open in surprise and her eyes closed. He had printed the absent neurologist’s phone number at the bottom, and let the answering machine take all calls to it.
There would have been no point in listing the number of his cellular phone—it rang all day long now, with apparently every idiot ghost in the country wanting to threaten him or weep at him or beg him for money or rides to Mexico. He had to answer it every time, though, because it was the line Salvoy would call in on; and at times during this last couple of days, tired of Long John Beach’s insane ramblings, Armentrout had even stayed on the line and had disjointed conversations with the moronic “ghostings,” as the old writers had referred to the things. They certainly were more gerund than noun.
The woman he was facing now, though, seemed to deserve a noun.
This morning a call had come in on the neurologist’s line, and Armentrout had picked it up after hearing a few sentences. It was an old man calling from a pay phone at the Moscone Convention Center, and he was excitedly demanding the reward money. Armentrout had driven over there and paid him fifty dollars, and the man had then told him that the woman and boy on the flyer, and two other men, were living in an upstairs apartment on Lapu Lapu, a block away.
And probably the old informant had been right. When Armentrout had burst into the indicated apartment, wearing his clumsy two-figure manikin appliance, the occupants had apparently just fled out the window. Two smoking television sets sat one atop the other in the middle of the room, chanting crazy admonitions at him like Moses’ own burning bush. He had shambled past them out onto the balcony before fleeing the room, but, though the two manikins he was yoked with had seemed to twitch spontaneously as he had stood out there in the rainy breeze, he had seen no one on the street below.
And so he had shuffled sideways back down the stairs and outside to the car. Fortunately Long John Beach had got tired of waiting in the back seat and had got out to urinate on the bumper—for Armentrout had no sooner opened his mouth to yell at the one-armed old man than he became aware of someone standing only a yard away from Long John Beach and himself.
Armentrout had jumped in huge surprise, the two manikins strapped to his shoulders twitching in synchronized response, for there had been no one standing there a moment earlier. The impossible newcomer was a lean dark-skinned woman in a ragged ash-colored dress, and her first words to him were in French, which he didn’t understand. In the gray daylight her face was shifting like an intercutting projection, from bright-eyed pubescence in one instant to eroded old age in the next. Armentrout knew enough not to meet her eyes.
“No habla Français,” he said hoarsely. This is a ghost, he told himself. A real one, standing beside my car on this San Francisco sidewalk. His shirt was suddenly clammy, and the heads and arms of the manikins yoked on either side of him were jiggling because his hands were shaking on the control levers inside the jackets of their green leisure suits.
“No habla Français,” echoed Long John Beach, stepping forward and shoving his still-swollen nose against the outside ear of the right-hand manikin, “today. No grandma’s cookies, so de little mon say. Madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this evening.”
The flickering woman goggled at the four heads in front of her—teeth were appearing and disappearing inside her open mouth—and clearly she was uncertain as to which head was which. Armentrout was careful to look away from her eyes, but as her gaze brushed past him he felt his attention bend with the weight of her unmoored sentience, and he shuddered at the realization that he had come very close to dying in that instant—in a group therapy session once he had seen a patient meet the eyes of a ghostly figure that had been loitering out on the lawn for several days after an in-house suicide, and the ghost figure had disappeared in the same moment that the patient had toppled dead out of his chair.
Now Long John Beach raised the amputated stump of his left arm, and the two Styrofoam manikin heads began nodding busily. Armentrout wasn’t doing it—he could feel the control lever in his nerveless right hand jiggling independently of him.
“If she hollers, let her go,” Long John Beach chanted as the heads bobbed, “my momma told me to pick this ver-ry one, and out … goes … you.”
He sneezed at the woman, and her face imploded; and with a disembodied wail of “Richeee!” she all at once became nothing more than a cloud of dirty smoke tumbling away down the sidewalk.
“G-good work, John,” stammered Armentrout, spitting helplessly as he spoke. The ghost-woman’s final cry had sounded like Armentrout’s mother’s voice—invoked by Long John Beach saying my momma?—and he was afraid he was about to wet his pants; well, if he did, he could switch trousers with one of the manikins, and people would think the Styrofoam-man had wet his pants. That would work. But then Armentrout would be wearing lime green pants with a gray tweed jacket.
He assured himself that what he feared was impossible. How could his mother’s ghost be here? He had left his loving mother in that bathtub in Wichita thirty-three years ago, drunk, dead drunk; and then intensive narcohypnosis and several series of ECT had effectively severed that guilt-ghost from him, way back in Kansas. “John, what do you suppose—”
“We better motate out o’ here,” interrupted the one-armed old man. “That was several girls in one corset. I sneezed a ghost at ’em to knock ’em down, but they’ll be back soon, with that ghost glued on now too.”
“Right, right. Jesus.” Armentrout was blinking tears out of his eyes. “Unstrap me, will you?”
With the deft fingers of his one hand—or maybe, it occurred to Armentrout now, with help from his phantom hand—Long John Beach unbuckled the two-manikin appliance, and Armentrout shrugged it off and tossed it into the back seat and got in behind the wheel and started the car. After the old man had gone back to the bumper to finish pissing, and had finally got in on the passenger side, Armentrout drove away through the indistinct shadow of the elevated 80 Freeway.
“Let me tell you a parable,” said Long John Beach, rocking in the passenger seat. “A man heard a knock at his door, and when he opened it he saw a snail on the doorstep. He picked up the snail and threw it as far away as he could. Six months later, he heard a knock at his door again, and when he opened it the snail was on the doorstep, and it looked up at him and said, ‘What was that all about?’ ”
Armentrout was breathing deeply and concentrating on traffic. “Don’t you start getting labile and gamy on me, John,” he said curtly.
He was driving north on Third Street, blinking through the metronomic windshield wipers at the lit office windows of the towers beyond Market Street. Beside him Long John Beach was now belching and gagging unattractively.
“Stop it,” Armentrout said finally, as he made a left turn and accelerated down the wet lanes southeast, toward Twin Peaks and the neurologist’s house. “Unroll the window if you’re going to be sick.”
In a flat, sexless voice, Long John Beach said, “I would be blind with weeping, sick with groans, look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs, and all to have the noble king alive.”
Armentrout blinked at the man uneasily. Ghosts were harmless in this form, channeled through the crazy old man, but their arrival often made the car’s engine miss—it had stalled almost constantly on the drive up here—and he worried about what the ghosts might overhear and carry back to the idiot bar where they seemed to hang out—“India,” the old writers had called that raucous but unphysical place. And this particular ghost, this sexless one that seemed to quote Shakespeare all the time, had been coming on through Long John Beach frequently lately, ever since their visit at dawn last Thursday to the beach below Scott Crane’s Leucadia estate.
There was something oracular about this ghost’s pronouncements, though, and Armentrout found himself impulsively blurting, “That last cry, from that ghost out on the sidewalk—that might have been my mother.”
“My dangerous cousin,” came the flat voice from Long John Beach’s mouth, “let your mother in: I know she is come to pray for your foul sin.”
“My foul sin?” Armentrout was shaking again, but he forced a derisive laugh. “And I’m no cousin of yours, ghosting. Don’t bother holding a chair for me, in your … moron’s tavern.”
“Most rude melancholy, Valerie gives thee place.”
“Shut up!” snapped Armentrout in a voice he couldn’t keep from sounding petulant and frightened. “John, come back on!” The one-armed figure was silent, though, and just stared at the streaks of headlights and neon on the gleaming pavement ahead; so Armentrout picked up the telephone and switched it on, meaning to punch in some null number and talk to whatever random ghost might pick up at the other end.
But someone was already on the line—apparently Armentrout had activated it in the instant before it would have beeped.
“Got no time for your ma nowadays, hey Doc?” came a choppy whisper from the earpiece. “She’s back here crying in her drink, complaining about you sneezing in her face. Shall I put her on?”
The cellular phone was wet against Armentrout’s cheek. “No, please,” he said, whispering himself. He knew this caller must be Omar Salvoy, Plumtree’s ingrown father, and Armentrout had no decent defenses against the powerful personality. The tape recording he had made last Wednesday had been magnetically erased by Salvoy’s field—even in the Faraday cage inside his desk!—and the vial of Plumtree’s blood had come open in Armentrout’s briefcase, and soaked the waxed-paper wrapper of a sandwich he’d stowed there for lunch; he couldn’t imagine how he could use a dried-out bloody sandwich as a weapon against the Salvoy personality. “You need my clinic,” he ventured weakly. “You need my authority for commitment of the boy, and ECT treatment, and maintenance on life-support.”
“I don’t need this black dog,” came the whisper. “When it barks, the whole India bar shakes out of focus. Is this your dog?”
In the passenger seat beside Armentrout, Long John Beach rocked his gray old head back against the headrest and began jerkily whining up at the headliner, in an eerily convincing imitation of a dog.
“Stop it!” Armentrout shouted at him, accidentally swerving the BMW in the lane and drawing a honk from a driver alongside.
“Take it slow, Daddy-O,” Salvoy said through the telephone. “I only got a minute, boyfriend is in the shower, and anyway I’m not … seated properly here, I’m steering from the back seat and can’t reach the pedals—as it were. Valerie is surely gonna kick me out again any time now. This isn’t the Fool’s dog, is it? Get away! Listen, my girl got away from me hard today, and that’s bad because tomorrow is a Dionysus deathday, it’s their best day to do the restoration-to-life trick with Scott Crane’s body. And my girl Janis tells me that they were talking last week to a ghost black lady in the Bay Area who claimed to have died in like 1903; that can only be this old voodoo-queen ghost known as Mammy Pleasant, who’s been screwing with TV receptions around here ever since there’s been TVs to screw with. If the Parganas crowd is still in touch with Pleasant, they might be getting some real horse’s mouth. Better than half-ass goat head. It’ll be by the water, in any case, at dawn—oh shit, stay by the phone.”
With a click, the line went dead. Then, seeming loud in contrast to Salvoy’s whispering, a girl’s nasal voice from the earpiece said, “Doctor, I’m eating broken glass and cigarette butts! Is this normal? I eat till I jingle, but I can’t fill myself up! Won’t you—”
Armentrout flipped the phone’s cover shut and slammed it back into its cradle. That last speaker had probably been the obese bipolar girl who had killed herself last week—but who was the flat-voiced one who had spoken through Long John, the one who seemed always to quote Shakespeare and who apparently called herself Valerie? Could it be Plumtree’s Valerie personality, astrally at large and spying on him? Good God, he had told her about his mother!
And the voice on the sidewalk had been his mother’s—Salvoy had said she’d been in the bar weeping about someone sneezing in her face.
Armentrout sighed deeply, almost at peace with the realization that he would have to perform a séance, and an exorcism, today.
Long John Beach had hunched forward over the dashboard now, sniffing in fast puffs punctuated by explosive exhalations.
It was so convincing that Armentrout almost thought he could smell wet dog fur. Long John had been doing this sort of thing periodically for the last couple of days, sniffing and whining and gnawing the neurologist’s leather couch—was the crazy man channeling the ghost of a dog?
This isn’t the Fool’s dog, is it?
It occurred to Armentrout that in most tarot-card decks the Fool was a young man in random clothes dancing on a cliff edge, with a dog snapping at his heels; and certainly Long John’s crazy speech, his “word-salad” as psychiatrists referred to skitzy jabbering, did sometimes hint at a vast, contra-rational wisdom.
But surely the crazy old man couldn’t be in touch with one of the primeval tarot archetypes! Especially not that one! The Fool was a profoundly chaotic influence, inimical to the kind of prolonged unnatural stasis that Armentrout needed to establish for the life-support confinement of the Parganas boy.
Could the old man possibly channel someone—or something—that big?
A Dionysus death-day.
Armentrout remembered the catastrophic ice-cream social at Rosecrans Medical Center last week. Long John Beach had seemed to be channeling—had seemed to be possessed by—the spirit of the actual Greek god Dionysus on that night. It was hard for Armentrout to avoid believing that Dionysus had somehow been responsible for the earthquake that had permitted Plumtree and that Cochran fellow to escape.
Armentrout thought he knew now why the death of the Fisher King had eliminated all the ghosts in the Southern California area. Murdered in the dead of winter, the slain Fisher King had become compellingly identical to the vegetation-god Dionysus, whose winter mysteries celebrated the god’s murder and devourment at the hands of the Titans and his subsequent return from the kingdom of the dead. Being a seasonal deity of death and the underworld—and incarnate this winter in this killed king—the god had taken all the local ghosts away with him, as a possibly unintended entourage, just as the death of summer takes away the vitality of plants, leaving the dried husks behind. In the case of the ghosts, it was their memories and strengths that had lingered behind, while their lethal, vengeful sentiences were conveniently gone.
If you like dead leaves, Armentrout thought as he drove, it’s good news to have a dead Fisher King; and I like dead leaves. I sustain myself spiritually on those dear dead leaves.
But eventually, he thought, if nature follows her cyclical course, Dionysus begins his trek back from the underworld, and a Fisher King again becomes evident; and the plants start to regain their life, and the ghosts—quickly, it seems!—are again resistant, dangerous presences. The god wants to rake up the dead leaves, he wants to gather to himself not only the ghosts but all the memories and powers and loves that had accrued to them … which scraps I don’t want to let him have. He wants us to figuratively or literally drink his pagadebiti Zinfandel, and let go of every particle of the cherished dead, give them entirely to him … which I don’t want to do.
When Armentrout and Long John Beach had finally got off the 280 Freeway last Thursday, the crazy old man had suddenly and loudly insisted that they take a right turn off of Junipero Serra Boulevard and drive five blocks to a quiet old suburban street that proved to be called Urbano; and in a grassy traffic circle off Urbano stood a gigantic white-painted wooden sundial on a broad flat wheel with Roman numerals from I to XII around the rim of it. After demanding that Armentrout stop the car, Long John Beach had got out and plodded across the street and walked back and forth on the face of the sundial, frowning and peering down around his feet as though trying to read the time on it—but of course the towering gnomon-wedge had been throwing no shadow at all on that overcast day. The passage of time, as far as this inexplicable sundial was concerned, was suspended.
And if Armentrout could succeed in getting the new Fisher King maintained flatline, brain-dead, on artificial life-support in his clinic, Dionysus’s clock would be stopped—at the one special point in the cycle that would permit Armentrout to consume ghosts with impunity—with no fear of consequences, no need for masks.
The two-manikin framework shifted and clanked in the back seat now as Armentrout drove fast through the Seventeenth Street intersection, the car’s tires hissing on the wet pavement. Market Street was curving to the right as it started up into the dark hills, toward the twin peaks that the Spanish settlers had called Los Pechos de la Chola, the breasts of the Indian maiden.
“There was still time,” Long John Beach said, in his own voice.
“For what?” asked Armentrout absently as he watched the red brake lights and turn-signal indicators reflecting on the wet asphalt ahead of them. “You wanted to get something to eat? There’s roast beef and bread at the house—though I should feed you in the driveway, the way you toss it around.” He passed a slow-moving Volkswagen and sped up, eager to put more distance between himself and that shifting maternal ghost on Lapu Lapu Street. “I should feed you Alpo.”
“I mean there was still time, even though I couldn’t see it. It doesn’t stop because you have something blocking the light. If we coulda seen in infrared,” he went on, pronouncing the last word so that it rhymed with impaired, “the shadow woulda been there, I bet you anything.” The BMW was abruptly slowing, because Armentrout’s foot had lifted from the gas pedal, but the old man went on, “Infrared is how they keep patty melts hot, in diners, when the waitress is too busy to bring ’em to you right when they’re ready.”
“Stay,” said Armentrout in a voice muted to a conversational tone by the sudden weight of fear; he took a deep breath and made himself finish the sentence, “out … of … my … mind. God damn you.” But his thoughts were as loud and rapid as his heartbeat: You can’t read my mind! You can’t start channeling me! I’m not dead!
Long John Beach shrugged, unperturbed. “Well, you go around leaving the door open …”
From the backseat came a squeak that could only have been one of the Styrofoam heads shifting against the other as the car rocked with resumed acceleration—but to Armentrout it sounded like a hiccup of suppressed laughter.
Tall cypresses hid from any neighboring houses the back patio of the neurologist’s villa on Aquavista Way, and the green slope of the northernmost Twin Peak mounted up right behind the pyrocantha bushes at the far edge of the lawn. After Armentrout had parked the car in the garage and made Long John Beach carry the two-manikin appliance out to the patio, he fixed a couple of sandwiches for the one-armed old man and then carefully began scouting up paraphernalia for a séance and exorcism in the back yard.
The neurologist’s house didn’t afford much for it—Armentrout found some decorative candles in glass chimney shades, and a dusty copper chafing dish no doubt untouched since about 1962, and a bottle of Hennessy XO, which was almost too good to use for plain fuel this way. Popov vodka would be more appropriate to his mother’s—
He hastily drank several mouthfuls of the cognac right from the bottle as he made himself walk around the cement deck of the roofed patio, shakily lighting the candles and setting them down in a six-foot-wide circle. Then he picked up a hibachi and walked around the circle shaking clumped old ash in a line around the perimeter; after he tossed the hibachi out onto the lawn, where it broke like glass, he walked around the circle again, stomping and scuffing the ash so that the line was continuous and unbroken. The chafing dish he set on a wooden chair inside the circle, and, needing both hands to steady the bottle, he poured an inch of brandy into it.
Then for several minutes he just stood and stared at the shallow copper pan while the morning hilltop breeze sighed in the high cypress branches and chilled his damp face. I can face her, he told himself firmly; if it’s for the last time, and if she’s concealed behind the idiot shell-masks of Long John Beach’s broken mind, and if I’m armed with the Sun card from the monstrous Lombardy Zeroth deck—and there’s brandy to lure her, and then burn her up.
A hitch that might have been a sob or a giggle quivered in his throat.
Will this mean I’ll have committed matricide twice?
He shivered in the cold wind, and took another big gulp of the brandy to drive away the image of the old face under the surface of the water, the lipsticked mouth opening and shutting, and the remembered cramps in his seventeen-year-old arms.
He looked up at the gray sky, and swallowed still another mouthful, and mentally recited the alphabet forward and backward several times.
At last he felt steady enough to go back inside and fetch out from under the bed the two purple velvet boxes.
“Finish your sandwich and get out here,” he told Long John Beach as he carried the boxes through the kitchen to the open back door. “We’ve got a … a call to make.”
When Long John Beach came shambling out of the house, absently rubbing mustard out of his hair and licking his fingers, Armentrout had to tell him several times to go over and stand inside the circle, before he finally got the old man’s attention. “And step over the ash line,” he added.
At last the old man was standing inside the circle, blinking and grinning foolishly. Armentrout forced himself to speak in a level tone: “Okay, John, we’re going to do our old trick of having you listen in on a call, right? Only this time, you’re going to be the telephone as well as the eavesdropper. ’Kay?”
Long John Beach nodded. “Ring ring,” he said abruptly, in a loud falsetto.
Armentrout blinked at him uncertainly. Could this be an incoming call? But this couldn’t start yet, he hadn’t lit the brandy yet! “Uh, who is this, please?” he asked, trying to sound stern so that the old man wouldn’t laugh at him if he’d just been clowning around and this wasn’t a real call.
“Dwayne,” said Long John Beach.
Armentrout tried to remember any patient who had ever had that name. “Dwayne?” he said. “I’m sorry—Dwayne who?”
“Dwayne the tub, I’m dwowning!”
Armentrout reeled back, gasping. It wasn’t his mother’s voice, but it had to be a sort of relayed thought from her ghost.
“J-John,” he said too loudly, fumbling in his pockets for a match or a lighter, “I want you to light the brandy—light the stuff in that pan there.”
He found a matchbook and tossed it into the circle, then fell to his knees on the wet grass beside one of the purple velvet boxes. I can’t shoot him, he thought, it wouldn’t stop her, she’s just passing through Long John’s train-station head.
He flipped open the other box and spilled the oversized cards out onto the grass, squinting as he pawed through them until he found the Sun card.
When he looked up, Long John Beach had lifted the copper chafing-dish pan in his one hand and was sniffing it. And now it was Armentrout’s mother’s voice that spoke from the old man’s mouth: “Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!”
“Put that down,” Armentrout wailed.
The pan tipped up toward the old man’s mouth.
“Mm—” Armentrout choked on the word mom, and had to make do with just shouting, “Don’t drink that! John! Kick out that woman’s ghost for a minute and listen to me!”
Suddenly, from the gate by the garage, a man’s voice called, “Dr. Armentrout?”
“Get out of here!” Armentrout yelled back, struggling to his feet. “This is private property!”
But the gate clanged and swung open, and it was the young intern from Rosecrans Medical Center, Philip Muir, who stepped out onto the backyard grass. He didn’t have his white coat on, but he was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie. “John!” he exclaimed, noticing the one-armed old man standing in the ash circle on the patio. Long John Beach was noisily drinking the brandy now, and slopping a lot of it into the white whiskers that bristled on his cheeks and neck these days. Muir turned to Armentrout. “He’s supposed to be at Pacifica.”
“I—have him out on a day pass,” Armentrout panted. “This is none of your—”
“Richie!” called Armentrout’s mother’s voice from Long John Beach’s throat, bubbling around the last gulp of the brandy. “Can you hear me under water? I’ve got a beard! Did they have to give me … hormones? Pull the plug, darling, and let me breathe! Where’s some more of this whiskey?”
Muir sniffed sharply. “And you’re giving him whiskey? Doctor, I—”
“It’s not whiskey,” babbled Armentrout, “it’s brandy, she doesn’t know the difference—”
Muir was frowning and shaking his head. “ ‘She’? What’s the matter with you? Have you got Plumtree and Cochran up here too? I know Cochran is in the area, he telephoned the vineyard he works at—”
Armentrout interrupted him to call out, “I’ll get you more liquor in a moment! Just—wait there!”
But Long John Beach blinked at him and spat. “I was never a liquor man,” he said. “I just ate smokes.”
Armentrout sighed deeply and sank down cross-legged beside the two velvet boxes. At least his mother was gone, for now. But Muir surely intended to report this, and investigate Beach’s transfer, and end Armentrout’s career. “Come over here, Philip,” he said huskily, lifting the lid of the box that contained the derringer. “I think I can show you something that will explain all of this.”
“It’s not me you need to be explaining things to. Why on earth did you give Plumtree ECT? What the hell happened during the ice-cream social last Wednesday? Mr. Regushi swallowed his tongue!”
Armentrout again got wearily to his feet, one hand holding the box and the other gripping the hidden derringer. “Just look at this, Philip, and you’ll understand.”
Muir angrily stepped forward across the grass. “I can’t imagine what it could be.”
“I guess it’s whatever you’ve made it.”
The flat, hollow boom of the .410 shot-shell was muffled by the cypresses and the hillside.