From the Corner of His Eye

Chapter 26

AFTER UNDERGOING TESTS for brain tumors or lesions, to ascertain whether his seizure of violent emesis might, in fact, have a physical cause, Junior was returned to his hospital room shortly before noon.

No sooner was he abed once more than he cringed at the sight of Thomas Vanadium in the doorway.

The detective entered, carrying a lunch tray. He put it on the adjustable bed stand, which he swung over Junior's lap.

“Apple juice, lime Jell-O, and four soda crackers,” said the detective. “If you don't have enough of a conscience to make you confess, then this diet ought to break your will. I assure you, Enoch, the fare is far better in any Oregon prison."

“What's wrong with you?” Junior demanded.

As though he'd not understood that the question required a reply and had not heard the implied rebuke, Vanadium went to the window and raised the venetian blind, admitting such powerful sunlight that the glare seemed to crash into the room.

“It's a sunshine-cake sort of day,” Vanadium announced. “Do you know that old song, 'Sunshine Cake,' Enoch? By James Van Heusen, a great songwriter. Not his most famous tune. He also wrote 'All the Way' and 'Call Me Irresponsible.' 'Come Fly with Me'—that was one of his, too. 'Sunshine Cake' is a minor tune, but a nice one."

This patter poured out in the detective's patented drone. His flat face was as expressionless as his voice was uninflected.

“Please close that,” Junior said. “It's too bright."

Turning from the window, approaching the bed, Vanadium said, “I'm sure you'd prefer darkness, but I need to get some light under that rock of yours to see your expression when I give you the news."

Although he knew it was dangerous to play along with Vanadium, Junior couldn't stop himself from asking, “What news?"

“Aren't you going to drink your apple juice?"

“What news?"

“The lab didn't find any ipecac in your spew.

Any what?” Junior asked, because he had pretended to be asleep when Vanadium and Dr. Parkhurst had discussed ipecac the previous night.

“No ipecac, no other emetic, and no poison of any kind."

Naomi had been cleared of suspicion. Junior was pleased that their brief and beautiful time together would not forever be clouded by the possibility that she was a treacherous bitch who had tainted his food.

“I know you induced vomiting somehow,” the detective said, “but it looks like I'm not going to be able to prove it."

“Listen here, Detective, these sick insinuations that somehow I had something to do with my wife's—"

Vanadium held up a hand as though to halt him and spoke over his complaint: “Spare me the outrage. Besides, I'm not insinuating any thing. I'm flat-out accusing you of murder. Were you humping another woman, Enoch? Is that where your motivation lies?"

“This is disgusting."

“To be honest—and I'm always honest with you—I can't find any hint of another woman. I've talked to a lot of people already, and every one thinks you and Naomi were faithful to each other."

“I loved her."

“Yeah, you said, and I already conceded that might even be true.

Your apple juice is getting warm."

According to Caesar Zedd, one cannot be strong until one first learns how always to be calm. Strength and power come from perfect self-control, and perfect self-control arises only from inner peace. Inner peace, Zedd teaches, is largely a matter of deep, slow, and rhythmic breathing combined with a determined focus not on the past, or even on the present, but on the future.

In his bed, Junior closed his eyes and breathed slowly, deeply. He focused on thoughts of Victoria Bressler, the nurse who waited anxiously to please him in the days ahead.

“Actually,” Vanadium said, “mainly I came to get my quarter."

Junior opened his eyes but continued to breathe properly to ensure calm. He tried to imagine what Victoria's breasts would look like, freed from all restraint.

Standing near the foot of the bed in a shapeless blue suit, Vanadium might have been the work of an eccentric artist who had carved a man out of Spam and dressed the meaty sculpture in thrift-shop threads.

With the stocky detective looming, Junior wasn't able to stroke his imagination into an erotic mood. In his mind's eye, Victoria's ample bosom remained concealed behind a starched white uniform.

“Cop's pay being what it is,” Vanadium said, “every quarter counts."

Magically, a quarter appeared in his right hand, between thumb and forefinger.

This could not be the quarter that he had left with Junior in the night. Impossible.

All day, for reasons he couldn't quite put into words, Junior had carried that quarter in a pocket of his bathrobe. From time to time, he had taken it out to examine it.

Returning from his tests, he'd gotten into bed without stripping off the thin, hospital-issue robe. He was still wearing it over his pajamas.

Vanadium couldn't know the whereabouts of the quarter. Besides, even when he'd swung the lunch tray over Junior's lap, the detective hadn't been close enough to pick the pocket of the robe.

This was a test of Junior's gullibility, and he would not give Vanadium the satisfaction of searching his robe for the coin.

“I'm going to file a complaint about you,” Junior promised.

“I'll bring you the proper form next time I visit."

Vanadium flipped the quarter straight into the air and at once spread his arms, palms turned up to show that his hands were empty.

Junior had seen the silvery coin snapping off the cop's thumb and spinning upward. Now it was gone, as though it had vanished in midair.

For an instant, his attention had been distracted by Vanadium's presentation of his empty hands. Nevertheless, there was no way the cop could have snatched the coin out of the air.

Yet, uncaught, the quarter would have dropped to the floor. Junior would have heard it ring off the tiles. Which he hadn't.

As quick as a snake strikes, Vanadium was much closer to the bed than he had been when he tossed the coin, at Junior's side now, leaning over the railing. “Naomi was six weeks pregnant."

“What?"

“That's the news I mentioned. Most interesting thing in the autopsy report."

Junior had thought the news was the lab report, which had found no ipecac in his spew. All that had been distraction.

Those spike-sharp eyes, — tenpenny gray, nailed Junior to the bed, pinning him for scrutiny.

Here, now, came the anaconda smile. “Did you argue about the baby, Enoch? Maybe she wanted it, and you didn't. Guy like you—a baby would cramp your style. Too much responsibility."

“I ... I didn't know."

“Blood tests should reveal whether the child's yours or not. That also might explain all this."

“I was going to be a father,” Junior said with genuine awe.

“Have I found the motive, Enoch?"

Astonished and appalled by the cop's insensitivity, Junior said, “You just drop this on me? I lost my wife and my baby. My wife and my baby."

“You're as good with the illusion of torment as I am with the quarter."

Tears burst from Junior, stinging torrents, a salt sea of grief that blurred his vision and bathed his face in brine. “Get out of here, you disgusting, sick son of a bitch,” he demanded, his voice simultaneously shaking with sorrow and twisted by righteous anger. “Get out of here now, get out!"

As he headed toward the door, the detective said, “Don't forget your apple juice. Got to build some strength for the trial."

Junior discovered more tears than could have been found in ten thousand onions. His wife and his unborn baby. He had been willing to sacrifice his beloved Naomi, but maybe he would have found the cost too high if he had known that he was also sacrificing his first-conceived child. This was too much. He was bereft.

No more than a minute after Vanadium departed, a nurse arrived in a rush, no doubt sent by the hateful cop. Hard to tell, through all the tears, if she was a looker. A nice face, perhaps. But such a stick-thin body.

Concerned that Junior's crying jag would trigger spasms of the abdominal muscles and ultimately another attack of hemorrhagic vomiting, the nurse had with her a tranquilizer. She wanted him to use the apple juice to wash down the pill.

Junior would rather have chugged a beaker of carbolic acid than touch the juice, because the lunch tray had been brought to him by Thomas Vanadium. The maniac cop, determined to get his man one way or another, was capable of resorting to poison if he felt that the usual instruments of the law were unequal to the task.

At Junior's insistence, the nurse poured a glass of water from the bedside carafe. Vanadium had been nowhere near the carafe.

After a while, the tranquilizer and the relaxation techniques taught by Caesar Zedd restored Junior's self-control.

The nurse stayed with him until his storm of tears had passed.

Clearly, he wasn't going to succumb to violent nervous emesis.

She promised to bring fresh apple juice after he complained that the serving before him had an odd taste.

Alone, calm again, Junior was able to apply what was arguably the central tenet of the philosophy of Zedd: Always look for the bright side.

Regardless — of the severity of a setback, no matter how dreadful a blow you sustained, you could always discover a bright side if you searched hard enough. The key to happiness, success, and mental health was utterly to ignore the negative, deny its power over you, and find reason to celebrate every development in life, including the cruelest catastrophe, by discovering the bright side to even the darkest hour.

In this case, the bright side was blindingly bright. Having lost both a singularly beautiful wife and an unborn child, Junior would earn the sympathy—the pity, the love—,of any jury in front of whom the state might hope to defend against a wrongful-death suit.

Earlier, he'd been surprised by the visit from Knacker, Hisscus, and Nork. He hadn't thought he'd see their kind for days; and then he would have expected no more than a single attorney taking a low-key approach and making a modest proposal.

Now he understood why they had descended in strength, eager to discuss redress, requital, restitutional apology. The coroner had in formed them, before the police, that Naomi had been pregnant, and they had recognized the state's extreme vulnerability.

The nurse returned with fresh apple juice, chilled and sweet.

Junior sipped the beverage slowly. By the time he reached the bottom of the glass, he had come to the inescapable conclusion that Naomi had been hiding her pregnancy from him.

In the six weeks since conception, she must have missed at least one menstrual period. She hadn't complained of morning sickness, but surely she'd experienced it. It was highly unlikely that she'd been unaware of her condition.

He had never expressed opposition to starting a family. She'd had no reason to fear telling him that she was carrying their child.

Regrettably, he had no choice but to conclude that she hadn't made up her mind whether to keep the baby or to seek out an illegal abortion without Junior's approval. She had been thinking about scraping his child out of her womb without even telling him.

This insult, this outrage, this treachery stunned Junior.

Inevitably, he had to wonder if Naomi had kept her pregnancy secret because, indeed, she suspected that the child wasn't her husband's.

If blood tests revealed that Junior wasn't the father, Vanadium would have a motive. It wouldn't be the right motive, because Junior truly hadn't known either that his wife was pregnant or that she was possibly screwing around with another man. But the detective would be able to sell it to a prosecutor, and the prosecutor would convince at least a few jurors.

Naomi, you dumb, unfaithful bitch.

He ardently wished that he hadn't killed her with such merciful swiftness. If he'd tortured her first, he would now have the memory of her suffering from which to take consolation.

For a while he looked for the bright side. It eluded him.

He ate the lime Jell-O. The soda crackers.

Eventually, Junior remembered the quarter. He reached into the right pocket of the thin cotton bathrobe, but the coin wasn't there, as it should have been. The left pocket also was empty.