THE STORM
The rain had spread all up and down the coast. In Marin County, north of San Francisco, gusts made the roads slippery and the visibility poor, and five teenagers in a Toyota failed to navigate a curve.
Just off the road was a nine-foot boulder with a curious history. It was not related to any of the rock formations near it. Long ago it had been part of the California subduction zone, had been dragged twenty miles down into the earth, churned about, squeezed, And abraded. Then, over millions of years, it rose slowly back to the surface, in time to receive the full force of the car at seventy miles an hour. The flaming wreckage scorched it, but with nothing like the heat it had already endured. More than enough, though, to char the five teenagers to indistinguishable pods of ash.
Saturday, December 26th. 8:15 PM.
Since he was a Pedigrue, the police gave him every care. Lieutenant Kwiatkowski took his statement in the lieutenant's own office, sitting at the lieutenant's own desk. There was a thick motel tumbler of good Scotch on one side of him and a plastic airlines cup of hot coffee on the other, and two of the family's lawyers were sitting by the wall listening to every word. It didn't take long.
It would, actually, have taken quite a lot longer if the lieutenant had not hurried it along so. He was not impolite. Not to a Pedigrue. Just anxious to get the bare facts, and not much else. The curious thing was that Tommy could remember every detail, the color of Myrna's blood on his cream linen jacket, the expression of the murderer, the absolute hush for a second after the flat smack of the pistol shot. He had been supercool, Tommy had, receiving every vibration. He still was. He noted the muddy trickle of rain at the corner of the lieutenant's window, the lock on the telephone dial, the American flag lapel pin on the blouse of the woman sergeant who was taking it all down. He sipped absently from either the Scotch or the coffee at random, taking time to be sure he got every particular exactly right. Even so the whole thing was over in fifteen minutes. The lawyer on the right came over close to him. "We'll stay with you for the identification, of course," he whispered, but Tommy shook his head. "You're sure? As you wish, Thompson, but please remember you're in shock. Please simply say nothing at all, to anyone. Certainly you should not volunteer anything about the young lady's, ah, personal life. "
Tommy waved him away, and then the lieutenant, too, courteously left him alone in the office—"to rest"—for no more than twenty minutes before they went over to the medical examiner's place for the really bad part.
But even the bad part was made as nearly painless as it could be. They had put Myrna's body on one of those rolling trolleys. It was in a little room by itself, none of those file-drawers of corpses you see on television. None of that smell of faint decay you imagined. No smell at all, and no sound. And no movement. The sheet was pulled back below her chin and her eyes had been closed. And the identification was only a formality anyway. "That's her," Tommy said, and was allowed to go. The lieutenant supplied a cop and a police car to drive Tommy wherever he wanted to go.
But there wasn't enough gas in the tank to take him where he wanted to go. Tahiti, maybe. The Gobi desert. The South Pole. Somewhere where no one knew him, and where he didn't have to speak to anyone.
On the other hand, he wanted to talk. The policeman was trying to be polite, but he had a little transistor radio going besides the regular police calls. It was almost all weather. There was a flash flood watch for all coastal and mountain areas, water was pouring over the spillways of the San Gabriel dam, traffic was blocked off on Topanga Canyon. "Bad storm," Tommy observed. "Sorry to take you out in it."
"That's all right, Mr. Pedigrue," the cop said, slowing down and observing with professional interest the flares and the slickered cops waving them around a three-car pileup.
"I guess you get used to this kind of thing," Tommy said, staring. If there were any mutilated bodies he couldn't see them. "It was quite a shock to me, though. And a real tragedy. She was a beautiful woman, Myrna."
He stopped himself then. He was being unnaturally talkative, and knew it, and knew that some of the things that were trembling in the back of his throat to be said were in bad taste. But he wasn't embarrassed; he was rather proud of himself for taking it so well. Still, who knew who this cop might talk to? "They've got the man that did it, anyway," he observed, and the policeman reluctantly switched off the transistor radio to humor this important person. Yes, the perpetrator was under arrest. He hadn't been charged yet, but there wasn't any doubt. He was crazy, sure. He'd been assigned a public defender at his request—he wasn't that crazy. He was probably being interrogated right now. It was not clear whether any of the other witnesses would be charged as accomplices, but some of them were still being questioned too. Not just about the shooting. Most of them disappeared long before the police arrived, but half a dozen had hung on, and the officers had found a little of pills and joints all over the floor, among the benches. So there was the narcotics angle, too. And, oh, sure, Mr. Pedigrue, most of them had records. Nothing really heavy. The tall black one had two felony convictions and had done time. One of the women had an active parole violation, but what it looked like to the cop, it was just another nut case. Like all those other nuts, you know? Squeaky Fromm and Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald . . . although, if you wanted the cop's opinion, that wasn't just a nut. No, sir. There were some pretty high-up people involved in that, stonewalling every investigation, and we probably wouldn't really ever get the truth on that one. You dig into those high-level politicians and you find they're just as goddam— At that point the policeman was happy to turn into the driveway of the Pedigrue estate, because he had just remembered who he was talking to. He put the floodlight on the door, and watched Tommy Pedigrue run through the rain until he was out of sight. If he had any wondering to do about his passenger it had to be deferred, because as soon as he had signed on again he had his orders. There was a man reported in trouble in Malibu Creek. It was going to be a long night and a wet one.
Tommy told the housekeeper he had to change out of his wet clothes and would see his father in the morning. She didn't question the fact that he was going right to sleep. She obviously didn't believe it, either, but that was not important. Tommy skinned out of the soggy linen jacket and realized that the dirty chocolate-bar smudge over the pocket was, actually, still Myrna's blood. He hurled it into the bathroom hamper and found a robe to wrap around his shivering body.
Maybe it had been a mistake to come here instead of going to his own home, but he didn't want to face his own home that night. This room was comfortable—this suite, rather—actually, this part of the children's suite that he had shared with his brother until Townsend went off to prep school and then into the world. His own closets were almost bare, so he wandered into Townsend's old room to find slippers and socks. His brother's room had been kept in strict tradition, with his Yale banner on the wall and his half-dozen Apollo blazer patches stitched to the bedspread and the one real basketball trophy be had ever won by the window. Tommy's own room was bare; he had cleaned it all out. But what remained, because it was not only a souvenir of his own childhood but Towny's as well, was the common playroom between, with its cupboards of rainy-day puzzles and games and its still marvelous HO model-train layout. Tommy had tried to get the train for his own kids, but Townsend would not hear of it; and then, of course, when Tommy 's marriage came apart there didn't seem to be any point.