Chosen Prey

20

"IHAD NO idea that you could show this depth of emotion, even about the death of a parent," Barstad said as they left the ME's office. "It's a side of you that I haven't seen before, James. I'm encouraged and…"

And blah-blah-blah, Qatar thought, tuning her out. There were still tears in his eyes, crouched at the corners, but they were quickly drying.

His mother. There had been some good times: Learning to ride a bicycle. Christmases come and gone. The first drawing materials she'd bought for him, and how, when he'd wanted to learn to paint, she'd gone down in the basement, and with his father's tools and a bunch of boards, laboriously put together a professional-quality easel. His first drawing lessons; his first life lessons; his first live naked woman, a redhead.

And some bad times.

He could remember Howard Cord, a history professor who wore red bow ties and seersucker suits, and smelled of tobacco and chalk, and how he would come over late in the evening, after he'd been sent to bed, and bang his mother's brains loose. She must've known that he could hear it all, in his bedroom right above hers, all the groaning and mumbled pleas for this or that. Must have suspected that he'd lifted a floorboard and cut a hole in a heating vent so he could watch. Watch her doing all that…

And not just Howard Cord; there had been ten or fifteen men from the time his father left, and then died, and he went off to school. Academics, mostly, his mother passed from hand to hand through the University of St. Patrick's and then St. Thomas; a priest or two, he thought.

But they were only bad times. In analyzing his own craziness, which did not come without psychological penalty, he really couldn't blame his mother's galloping sexuality for his problems. They went much further back. He remembered still the intense pleasure of burning ants with a magnifying glass when he was not yet in grade school; remembered even the acrid scent of the little puffs of smoke. He drowned gerbils in grade school, put them in the aquarium during recess, while Mrs. Bennett was out in the schoolyard; and he still remembered the quiet of the schoolroom, and the distant shouts of the other children, barely audible through the windows, and the frantic paddling of the gerbils. They looked like they might last a little too long, so he pushed them under, both of them, one at a time, and watched their slowly diminishing struggles through the glass walls…

He'd already known enough to hide himself and his impulses. He'd slipped out of the room in time to have a few words with the teacher on the playground, to establish his presence there.

And when the gerbils had been found, he'd happily helped plan the funeral.

His personal craziness had been there all along, the cross he must bear. Bear it he did. His mother was not to blame.

"… Blah-blah-blah?" she asked.

He hadn't heard any of it. He had, in fact, brought her along as a prop. His woman, should any of the cops think there might be something odd about him. They had been all over campus. "What?"

"What now? There's not much to do until you know when… she'll be released," Barstad said.

"I don't think I can deal with it right now," he said. "I'll call the funeral home this afternoon. Let them handle it. We weren't religious, so there won't be any church services." The tears were gone now. "Why don't we-I don't know-should I take you home?"

"We could walk around for a while."

"I haven't eaten. I don't know if I could eat," Qatar said "Maybe a little something."

They walked to the Pillsbury Building, went up the escalator and through the warren of shops in the skyway. "It's really like a Middle Eastern bazaar," Barstad said. They were in the back of a coffee shop, eating baklava and drinking strong coffee. "You could get exactly what we're eating and drinking anywhere between Istanbul and Cairo, in the same circumstances, except the people are polite there and the coffee isn't as good."

"Never been there, the Middle East," Qatar said vaguely. Then: "Have you ever noticed that men with a certain shape of skull don't look good with high collars? They need flat collars?"

"What?"

"Would I look right in a turtleneck, do you think? Or would it come so far up my neck that my face would look like… that I'd look like, like a Renaissance burgher?" He crossed his hands, thumbs under his chin as though he were strangling himself, to show her the line of the sweater. "It frames the face, you see, but it also isolates it."

"I see," she said. "Well, if the person were tanned or sunburned, I think there's a possibility that the head would look wooden. You'd look like a wood carving on a pedestal."

"Hmm," he said. Actually, that sounded interesting. "Let's walk some more," he said.

In fact, he had the money in his pocket from his mother's house; and Saks and Neiman Marcus were right around the corner. On the way to the mall, he stopped and looked in the window of a jewelry store, where they were featuring small men's rings set with star sapphires. He'd never considered a ring, but they had a certain look.

"In here," he said. "Just on a lark."

He paid two thousand dollars for a gold ring that perfectly fit his right pinkie. "My mother's favorite color was blue," he told her. He teared up again, wiped them away, and they mushed on to Saks.

The men's store was on the first level. He led her down to the first level-and there they found the most marvelous thigh-length leather jacket, smooth-finished with kangaroo-hide details, on sale, $1,120.

He looked at it and said, "Oh my God, forty-long." Her eyes were on him, and he said, reverently, "It's exactly my size."

"Oh my God," she said.