One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 31

BUTTONS GLEAMED, badges flashed, buckles shone on the khaki uniforms of the cops milling outside the front door of Cielo Vista Care Home.

Martin Vasquez, general manager of this facility, stood apart from the police, beside one of the columns that supported the loggia trellis. Called from bed at a bleak hour, he had nonetheless taken time, as an expression of respect, to dress in a dark suit.

In his forties, Vasquez had the smooth face and the guileless eyes of a pious young novitiate. As he watched Noah Farrel approach, he looked as though he would have gladly traded this night's duty for vows of poverty and celibacy. "I'm so sorry, so sick about this. If you'll come to my office, I'll try to make sense of it for you, as much as can be made."

Noah had been a cop for only three years, but he'd been present at four homicide scenes in that time. The expressions on the faces and in the eyes of these attending officers matched the look that he had once turned upon the grieving relatives in those cases. Sympathy formed part of it, but also a simmering suspicion that persisted even after a perpetrator was identified. In certain types of homicides, a family member is more likely to be involved than a stranger, and regardless of what the facts of the case appear to be, it's always wise to consider who might gain financially or be freed of an onerous responsibility by the death in question.

Paying for Laura's care had been not a burden, but the purpose of his existence. Even if these men believed him, however, he would till see the keen edge of suspicion sheathed in their sympathy.

One of the cops stepped forward as Noah followed Vasquez to the front door. "Mr. Farrel, I've got to ask you if you're carrying."

He had pulled on chinos and a Hawaiian shirt. The holster was in the small of his back. "Yeah, but I've got a permit for it."

"Yes, sir, I know. If you'll trust me with it, I'll return it to you when you leave."

Noah hesitated.

"You were in my shoes once, Mr. Farrel. If you think about it, you'll realize you'd do the same."

Noah wasn't sure why he had strapped on the pistol. He didn't always carry it. He didn't usually carry it. When he'd left home, after Martin Vasquez's call, he hadn't been thinking clearly.

He surrendered the handgun to the young officer.

Although the lobby was deserted, Vasquez said, "We'll have privacy in my office," and indicated a short hallway off to the left.

Noah didn't follow him.

Directly ahead, the door stood open between the lobby and the long main corridor of the ground-floor residential wing. At the far end, more men gathered outside of Laura's room. None wore a uniform. Detectives. Specialists with the scientific-investigation division.

Returning to Noah's side, Vasquez said, "They'll let us know when you can see your sister."

A morgue gurney waited near her room.

"Wendy Quail," Noah guessed, referring to the perky raven-haired nurse who had been serving ice cream sundaes a few hours ago.

On the phone, he had been given only the essence of the tragedy. Laura dead. Gone quickly. No suffering.

Now, Martin Vasquez expressed surprise. "Who told you?"

So his instinct had been right. And he hadn't trusted it. Ice cream wasn't the answer, after all. Love was the answer. Tough love, in this case. One of the Circle of Friends had indulged in a little tough love, teaching Noah what happens to the sisters of men who think they're too good to accept airsickness bags full of cash.

In his mind's eye, Noah imagined himself squeezing the trigger and the congressman contorting in agony around a gut wound.

He could do it, too. He was without a purpose now. A man needed worthwhile work to occupy his time. In the absence of anything more meaningful, maybe revenge would suffice.

Receiving no answer to his question, Vasquez said, "Her resume was impressive. And her commitment to nursing. Several excellent letters of recommendation. She said she wanted to work in a less stressful atmosphere than a hospital."

For seventeen years, since Laura was beaten out of this world but not all the way into the next, Noah had pretended that he wasn't a Farrel, that he was an outsider in his criminal family, just as Laura had been an outsider, that he was cleaner of heart than those who had conceived him, capable of being redeemed. But with his sister twice lost and beyond recovery, he could see no reason to resist embracing his true dark nature.

"But caught," said Vasquez, "she admitted everything. She's been a nurse in neonatal-care units at three hospitals. Each time, just when someone might begin to wonder if all the infant deaths pointed to something worse than just nature's work, she changed jobs."

Killing the congressman wouldn't give Noah a new cup from which to drink, but the pleasure of that murder might be sweet enough to mask, for a while, the bitterness here at the bottom of his life.

"She admits to sixteen babies. She doesn't think what she's done is wrong. She calls those murders her 'little mercies.' "

He had been listening to Vasquez but hardly hearing what was said. At last a measure of the man's meaning penetrated. "Mercies?"

"She chose infants with health problems. Or sometimes just those who looked weak. Or whose parents seemed dirt poor and ignorant. She says she was sparing them from lives of suffering."

Noah's instinct had been half right. The nurse was bent, but not by the Circle of Friends. Yet their roots grew from the same swamp of self-importance and excess self-esteem. He knew their kind too well.

"Between the third neonatal unit and here," Vasquez said, "she worked at a nursing home. Euthanized five elderly patients without arousing suspicion. She's. proud of those, too. Not only no remorse, but also no shame at all. She seems to expect us to admire her for. for her compassion, she would call it."

The congressman's evil was born of greed, envy, and a lust for power, which was a logical wickedness that Noah understood. That was the evil of his old man, of Uncle Crank.

The nurse's irrational idealism, on the other hand, incited only cold contempt and disgust, not a raging desire for revenge. Without a banquet of vengeance to sustain him, Noah felt starved of purpose once more.

"Another member of the staff walked in on Nurse Quail when she was.. finishing with your sister. Otherwise, we wouldn't have known."

At the far end of the long corridor, a guy wheeled the gurney into Laura's room.

Rolling through Noah's head came a sound like distant thunder or the faraway roar of a great cataract, soft though charged with power.

He passed through the door between the lobby and the residential hallway. Martin Vasquez called to him, reminding him that the police had restricted access to this area.

Approaching the nurses' station, Noah was met by a uniformed officer who attempted to turn him back.

"I'm family."

"I know that, sir. Won't be much longer."

"Yeah. It'll be now."

When Noah tried to move past him, the cop put a hand on his shoulder. Noah wrenched loose, didn't take a swing, but kept going.

The young officer followed, grabbed him again, and they would have gotten physical then, because the cop had no choice, but mainly because Noah wanted to hit someone. Or maybe he wanted to be hit, hard and repeatedly, because physical pain might distract him from an anguish for which there was neither numbing medication nor any prospect of healing.

Before any punches were thrown, one of the detectives farther along the hall said, "Let him through."

The roar of live Niagaras still echoed from a distance in Noah's mind, and though this internal sound was no louder than before, the voices of the men around him were muffled by it.

"I can't let you alone with her," the detective said. "There's an autopsy gotta be done, and you know I'll have to show we've had continuous possession of the evidence."

The corpse was evidence. Like a spent bullet or a bloody hammer. Laura had ceased to be a person. She was an object now, a thing.

The detective said, "Don't want to give that crazy bitch's attorney any chance to say someone tampered with the remains before we got toxicology back."

Crazy bitch instead of defendant, instead of the accused. No need to be politically correct here, as later in court.

If the attorney could sell the crazy without the bitch, however, then the nurse might do light time in a progressive mental facility with a swimming pool, TVs in every room, classes in arts and crafts, and sessions with a therapist not to analyze her homicidal compulsion but to ensure that she maintained high self-esteem.

Juries were stupid. Maybe they hadn't always been, but they were stupid these days. Kids killed their parents, resorted to the orphan defense, and a reliable percentage of jurors grew teary-eyed.

Noah couldn't rekindle his fury either with the prospect of the nurse remanded to a country-club sanitarium or with the possibility that she would be entirely acquitted.

The distant roar in his head wasn't the sound of building rage. He didn't know what it was, but he couldn't shut it off, and it scared him. Laura on the bed. In yellow pajamas. Either she had come out of her cataleptic trance sufficiently to dress for sleep or perhaps the nurse had changed her, brushed her hair, and arranged her artfully as a courtesy before the killing.

The detective said, "Quail figured, given the patient's brain damage, death would be attributed to natural causes without a full autopsy. She didn't bother using a substance that would be hard to trace. It was a massive injection of Haldol, a tranquilizer."

By the time Laura turned eight, she understood that her family wasn't like others. A conscience had never been nurtured in her, not in the Farrel house, but nature had given her a strong moral sense.

Shame came easily to her, and everything about her family mortified her more deeply year by year. She kept to herself, taking refuge in books and daydreams. She wanted only to grow up, to get out, and to make a life that would be "clean, quiet, not a harm to anyone."

The detective tried to console Noah with a final revelation: "The overdose was so large, death was immediate. That crap just shut down the central nervous system like a switch."

By the time she was eleven, Laura wanted to be a doctor, as if she no longer felt able to cut free of her roots merely by doing the world no harm. She needed to give to other people, perhaps through medicine, in order to ransom her soul from her family.

When she was twelve, she morphed in her daydreams from physician to veterinarian. Animals made better patients. Most people, she said, could never be cured of their worst sicknesses, only of their body's ailments. No one should have to learn that much about the human condition by the tender age of twelve.

Twelve years of striving to shape the future with dreams and seventeen more years of dreaming without purpose ended here, in this bed, where no more dreams waited beneath the pillows.

The detectives and the medical examiner's people had stepped back, leaving Noah alone at the bedside, although they continued to watch in their capacity as guardians of the mortal evidence.

Laura rested on her back, arms at her sides. The palm of her left hand lay flat against the sheets, but her right hand was turned up and closed in a three-quarter fist, as if in the final instant, she had tried to hold fast to life.

Both the porcelain-smooth half and the ruined half of her face were revealed, God's work and Crank's.

To Noah, now that he would never see her again, both sides of her face were beautiful. They touched his heart in different ways.

We bring beauty with us into this world, as we bring innocence, and the ugliness that we take with us when we leave is what we've made of ourselves instead of what we should have made. Laura had moved on from this life with no ugliness at all. Only the soul leaves here; and hers was without stain or scar, as innocent at departure as it had been upon arrival.

Noah had lived longer and more fully than his sister, but not as well. He knew that when his time came to go, unlike her, he wouldn't be able to leave behind all his ugliness with his blood and bone.

He almost began to talk to her, as he had talked so often over the years, hour after hour, with the hope that she heard him and was comforted. But now that his sister had traveled beyond hearing, Noah discovered he had nothing to say anymore — not to her, not to anyone.

He had hoped that the distant thunder in his head would stop rolling when he saw Laura and confirmed beyond doubt that she was gone. Instead, the roar gradually grew louder.

He turned from the bed and walked away. The air thickened and resisted him at the threshold, but only for an instant.

Across the hallway, the door opposite Laura's was closed. On his last few visits, that room — also a single — had stood open for airing because no patient currently occupied it.

Although a new resident might have been admitted in the past few hours, instinct carried Noah boldly across the hall. He threw open the door and took one step past the threshold before men seized him from behind, restraining him.

Nurse Quail sat in an armchair, so petite that her feet barely touched the floor. Twinkling blue eyes, pink complexion, pert and pretty: as Noah remembered her.

Two men and one woman were with the murderess. At least one of them would be a homicide detective and at least one would be from the DAs office. The three were tough professionals, skilled at psychological manipulation, not likely to allow any suspect to hijack an interrogation.

Yet Wendy Quail clearly controlled the situation, most likely because she was too deluded to understand the real nature of her situation. Her posture and her expression weren't those of a suspect facing a hard inquisition. She appeared to be as poised as royalty, like a queen granting an audience to admirers.

She didn't shrink from Noah, but smiled at him in recognition. She held out a hand toward him as might a queen who saw before her a grateful subject who had come to kneel abjectly and to offer effusive appreciation for some grace that earlier she had bestowed on him.

Now he knew why he'd been required to check his pistol at the front door: just in case an unexpected encounter like this occurred.

Maybe he would have shot her if he'd had the handgun; but he didn't think so. He had the capacity to kill her, the nerve and the ruthlessness, but he didn't have the requisite rage.

Curiously, Wendy Quail failed to arouse his anger. In spite of the self-satisfaction that virtually oozed from her, and although her peaches-and-cream cheeks pinked with the warmth generated by a well-banked and well-tended moral superiority, she lacked the substance to excite anyone's hatred. She was a hollow creature into whose head had been poured evil philosophies that she couldn't have brewed in the cauldron of her own intellect; and if in her formative years she had been exposed to a gentler and humbler school of thought, she might have been the committed healer that now she only pretended to be. She was plates and platters of plights and pickles; she was ice cream therapy; but although she was worthy of being loathed and even of being abhorred, she was too pathetic to merit hatred.

Noah allowed himself to be drawn backward out of the room before the nurse could speak some witless platitude. Someone closed the door between them.

Wise enough to offer no commiseration or advice, two detectives escorted him along the corridor toward the lobby. Noah had never been a member of their department; his three years of service had been in another of the county's many cities, which interlocked like puzzle pieces in a jigsaw of jurisdictions. Nevertheless, they were his age or older, and they knew why he no longer wore a uniform. They surely understood why he had done what he'd done, ten years ago, and they might even sympathize with him. But they had never straddled the line that he had crossed with both feet, and to them he was to be treated as politely as any citizen but with more wariness, regardless of the fact that at one time he had worn the tin and done the job just as they did. They spoke to him only to report how long the body would be held by the medical examiner and to describe the process by which it could be claimed and be transferred to a mortuary.

The care home's residents had been asked to remain in their rooms with the doors closed, and had been issued sleep aids when they requested them. But Richard Velnod stood in his open doorway, as though waiting for Noah.

Rickster's unnaturally sloped brow seemed to recede from his eyes at a more severe angle than previously, and gravity exerted a greater than ordinary pull on his heavy features. His mouth moved, but his thick tongue, always a barrier to clear speech, failed him entirely this time; no sound came from him. Although usually his eyes were windows to his thoughts, they were paled now by tears, and he seemed to be holding back some question that he was afraid to ask.

The detectives would have preferred that Noah leave directly, but he stopped here and said, "It's all right, son. She didn't have any pain." Rickster's hands moved restlessly, pulling at each other, at the buttons on his pajama top, at his low-set ears, at his wispy brown hair, and at the air as though he might pluck understanding from it. "Mr. Noah, wha. wha..?" His mouth went soft, twisted with anguish.

Assuming that the question had been Why? Noah could provide no answer other than a platitude worthy of Nurse Quail: "It was just Laura's time to go."

Rickster shook his head. He wiped at his flooded eyes, swabbed wet hands across damp cheeks, and gathered his troubled face into an expression so affectingly earnest, so miserable, so desperate that Noah could hardly bear to look at it. Rickster's mouth firmed, and his malformed tongue found the shape of the words that had a moment ago eluded it, and he asked not Why? but a question more to the point and yet even more difficult to answer: "What's wrong with people?"

Noah shook his head.

"What's wrong with people?" Rickster implored.

His eyes fixed so beseechingly on Noah that it was impossible to turn away from him without responding, and yet impossible to lie even though, to this hard question, lies were the only answers that would soothe.

Noah knew that he should just put an arm around the boy and walked him back to his bed, where the framed photographs of his dead parents stood on the nightstand. He should have tucked him in and talked to him about anything that came to mind, or about nothing at all, as he had talked for so many years to his sister. More than a need to know what was wrong with people, loneliness plagued this boy, and although Noah had no insight into the source of human cruelty, he could medicate loneliness with a gift of his time and company.

He felt burnt out, however, and doubted that he had anything within him worth giving. Not anymore. Not after Laura.

He had no idea what was wrong with people, but he knew that whatever might have broken in the soul of humanity was manifestly broken in him.

"I don't know," he told this cast-away boy with the castaway face. "I don't know."

By the time that he retrieved his pistol and reached his car in the parking lot, the previously faraway roar in his head grew louder and acquired a more distinctive character. No longer like thunder, it might have been the angry chanting of the whole mad crowd of humankind — or still the rumble of water tumbling from a high cliff into an abyss.

On the way to Cielo Vista, he'd broken every law of the highway; but he exceeded no speed limits on the way home, ran no stop signs. He drove with the exaggerated care of a cautious drunk because, mile by mile, the surging sound within him was accompanied by a deepening flood of darkness, and those black torrents seemed to spill from him into the California night. Block by block, streetlamps appeared to grow dimmer, and previously well-lighted avenues seemed to be drowned in murk. By the time he parked at his apartment, the river that might have been hope finished draining entirely into the abyss, and Noah was borne to a bottle of brandy and to his bed on the currents of a bleaker emotion.