Seeing Red, page 12
It was in. As Vivia had wanted.
He lugged the rousted bush out with him so that it might not be discovered and replanted by whatever minority Bigelow engaged to manicure his grounds. Walking heel-to-toe in burglar doubletime, palm stinging and wet, Steve felt absurdly victorious, as though he'd just bounced a homer off Bigelow's noggin instead of merely vandalizing a hedge. He had come through for Vivia, and thus gained a kind of control over her, too. In a single day he had galloped the gamut of rough emotions. By the time dawn began to tint the sky, he felt renewed—exhausted yet charged, back in the running, a success in the making, confirmed executive fodder. Definitely up-market.
He ditched the murdered rosebush in a supermarket trash dumpster on his way home.
According to the adage that defines sanity as the first twenty minutes following orgasm, what Casey (Steve's most recent non-Calex blonde) had told him not so long ago was sane, reasoned.
"I don't think you like women very much. Present company excluded, of course."
"Of course." He had stroked her thigh, his lungs burning with immediate umbrage at her remark. Who in hell was this vacant twinkle to pass judgment? They had swapped climax for climax, shared a smoke, and now she was gearing up to pry into his psyche. It always began around the fourth fuck or so, these sloppy digressions into his private feelings. He'd given her a good technical orgasm and this was how she responded. They were past the stage where he could joke off such an accusation, as more tentatively acquainted people can. His fingers traced upward knowingly, commencing in automatic motions guaranteed to shut her up.
Further, in Casey's opinion, some woman had done vast damage to Steve in the past. That he had been avenging that hurt on every woman he'd touched since, trying to distill away the poison inside him. That things could change at last, now that she had arrived on the scene.
In that moment Steve's judgment on Casey banged down like a slamming cell door. Things did change, and quickly. He brought the prying bitch off hard, with some pain. While she was still moist, he slammed into her as though driving nails. The next morning he subtracted her from his Rolodex, hoping she was sore for a long time.
That was lost in the past now.
Now, Steve lay next to Vivia, recalling Casey's words and wondering if they might have been true . . . and whether Vivia might not be the turnaround he didn't even know he had been seeking for most of his adult life.
The past four weeks had been a whirlwind of input for him. When not assimilating and processing the swelling workload dumping downward from Bigelow's office, he was wrapped up in Vivia, who had taken a fervently single-minded interest in his sexual well-being. Bigelow had called in sick in the middle of the first week, and Steve had marveled frankly and quietly. The fat old bastard finally lumbered into the office late on Thursday and botched everything he touched. By Friday—exactly one week after Steve had been carpet-called for using the computer on the sly—Bigelow had mazed his way back to Steve's cubicle in person again . . . but this time it had been to thank him.
Oh, how he had savored that moment!
"You've performed admirably, Keller," he'd croaked, redfaced and dappled with fever-sweat. "You've risen to the occasion and saved my callused old butt; I was beginning to think you didn't have that kind of dedication. I appreciate all your help, and the extra hours you've put in during this . . . uh, time." Steve had said yes sir at the appropriate lulls in the rally-round-the-company spiel, invoking his new prerogative as victor not to rub Bigelow's veiny nose in the events of the past. When the old man finished, he had shuffled out, slump-shouldered. He didn't make another appearance in the office until the following Wednesday. That was when the thought of just what might be growing, unobtrusively, amid the rosebushes in Brentwood, began to gnaw at Steve. "Why my blood, anyway?" he asked Vivia. "Why not his? I mean, he's the object—the victim, right?"
Whenever he brought up the subject of the seed, she seemed to answer by rote. "Whose blood is used for the consecration isn't important. It's who the plant grows nearest to. It leaches away the life essence, thrives on it. As it grows larger, it needs more. Those asleep near it are especially susceptible. It reaches maturity in one month, from one full moon to the next." She draped one of her fine white legs over his. "Then it dies."
"The blood is just to prime the pump? Get it started?"
"Mm." Her hands were upon him. Getting him started.
"Just what is it you've got against Bigelow? You know, I tried to find your company-employee index number on the computer and came up with zilch." She had since given him a last name, but that had not dissipated the mystery.
"What is it you have against him?" she countered, with a trace of irritation. "And what does it matter? You're not the only person privileged to hate him for the things he's done!"
He thought she was sidestepping; then he caught on. Bigelow's blue-rinsed wife lent perspective to the supposition of a squirt of randiness somewhere in his boss' recent past. Promises, perhaps, traded for a bit of extramarital hoop-de-doo with a Calex functionary who had just happened to be Vivia. Unfulfilled promises, naturally—the office rule was that verbal contracts weren't worth the paper they weren't written on. So Vivia had lain back and devised her retaliation. For Steve to bring this matter up in bed, he now saw, was deeply counterproductive.
She did not let him pursue it further, at any rate. "It'll be done soon now, darling, don't worry it." She poured them both another of her stinging-cold, perfect martinis. "And we'll both get what we want."
He was surely getting what he wanted. Vivia seemed satisfied, too. He had long since given her a door key; he usually found her awaiting his pleasure, and he liked that.
"Give me what I want," he said, and she rolled onto him. He thought he was happy.
During the final week, Bigelow did not appear in the Calex Building at all. The scuttlebutt was that he'd suffered a minor stroke.
"I took a stack of escalation briefs out to his house, y'know?" It was Cavanaugh, Steve's former competitor, spreading the news. "Steve, he looked like hell; I mean, pallid, trembling. His eyes were yellow and bloodshot, the works. I was afraid to breathe air in the same room with him, y'know? It's like he got the plague or something!"
Steve nodded, appearing interested. He was learning the executive trait of letting his subordinates do most of the talking. With open hands of sympathy he said, "Well, in the old man's absence I'm stuck with twice the work, and it's time I got back into it."
Cavanaugh was dismissed. That was something else new, and Steve was getting better at it. It made him feel peachy.
While he had made no effort to see what had blossomed at Bigelow's, his desire to know had germinated and grown at a healthy pace. Vivia had said the plant would die with the coming of the next full moon, its task complete. It all sounded like a shovelful of occult hoodoo, as vague as a syndicated horoscope. A thriving plant shouldn't keel over due to a timetable, he thought, horticultural genius that he was. Since the technique appeared to be working and producing results, simple Calex procedure dictated no need to scrutinize the bows and whys. You didn't have to know how a television set worked to enjoy it; how Objet d'Art functioned, to appreciate its scent on women.
Time was running short. Time for Bigelow, time to see what had sprung from the black seed.
"You don't really need to see it," Vivia had agreed. "That would be superficial."
Again he nodded. Her words were reassuring and correct. Once she drowsed off, he went out driving in the wee hours one more time.
He duplicated his original route and found the Brentwood streets unchanged. A blue and white Conroy security car hissed past in the opposite lane. That was the last Steve saw of the local minions of armed response.
Two curious sights awaited him at the bedroom window. The first was Bigelow, tossing about in his bed, sheets askew. He was in the grip of some nightmare, or spasm. His flesh shone greenly under a ghostly-soft nightlight, by which Steve saw the bed stand, littered with medications. The old man's movements were enfeebled and retarded by fitful sleep; the thrashing of a suffocating fish.
Then there was the plant. Against the all-weather white of the ranch house's siding, it was quite visible.
It was confused among the rosebush branches, and resembled a squat tangle of black snakes, diverging wildly as though the shoots wanted nothing to do with each other. Like the chitinous hardness of the seed, the branches were armored in a kind of exoskeleton of deep, lacquered black. The small leaves that had sprouted at the ends of each branch were dead ebony, dull and waxy to the touch, with spade shapes and serrated edges. He leaned closer, to touch, and felt a paper-cut pain in the tip of his finger that caused him to jerk back his hand and bite his lip in the dark.
Kneeling, he unclipped a penlight from his pocket, oblivious to the risk of being spotted, and saw that the skin of the plant was inlaid with downy white fibers, like extremely fine hair. They were patterned directionally, in the manner of scales on a viper; to stroke them one way would be to feel a humid softness while the opposite direction would fill the finger with barbs like slivers of glass. Steve tried to tweezer the tiny quill out with his teeth.
The black plant exuded no odor whatsoever, he noticed. He found that to be the most unsettling aspect of all, since all plants smelled like something, from the whore's perfume of night-blooming jasmine to the clean-laundry scent of carnations. This had all the olfactory presence of a bowl of plastic grapes.
He heard a strangled cough through the windowpanes and saw Bigelow stir weakly in his bed. The moon was ninety-percent full. Tomorrow night it would be perfect.
Watching his superior whittled down in this way, Steve realized that now it wasn't necessary that the old man actually die. Ever since his conjecture about Bigelow's dalliance with Vivia, he'd begun to feel an inexplicable fraternal sympathy for the old goat. Would Steve care to come to such a finish, merely because he'd chased a hit of tail in his declining years? Vivia sure was enthusiastic enough about jumping his bones to get her revenge on Bigelow. And Steve's future with Calex seemed locked without the nastiness of a death to blot it . . . didn't it?
Was he starting to feel sorry for the fat old bastard?
Inside the house, Bigelow let out a congested moan, and the sound put ice into Steve's lungs.
Impulsively he gathered the black plant in two fists and hoisted it upward, hoping to tear loose the roots. The rosebushes rattled furiously, shifting about like pedestrians witnessing an ugly car crash, but the plant remained solidly anchored, unnaturally so. Yanking a mailbox out of a concrete sidewalk would have been easier. Steve's hand skinned upward along the glossy stalks and collected splinter quills all the way up. This time he did scream.
Bigelow stopped flailing. Now he was awake, and staring at the window.
Tears doubling his vision, blood dripping freely from his tightly clenched fists, Steve fled into the night.
Shortly after lunch on Friday, Cavanaugh wandered into Steve's office wearing a hangdog, H.P. Lovecraft face, broadcasting woe. His eyebrows arched at the sight of Steve's bandaged hands, but the younger man was determined to maintain the proper, respectful air of gloom and tragedy.
"I got the phone call ten minutes ago," he said, nearly whispering. "I don't know if you've heard. But, uh—"
"Bigelow?" Steve was mostly guessing.
Cavanaugh closed his eyes and nodded. "Sometime last night. His wife said he saw a prowler. He was reaching for the phone when his heart—"
"Stopped." Steve folded his hands on the desk. The old man had probably hit the deck like a sledgehammered steer.
Cavanaugh stood fast, fidgeting. "Um, Blakely will probably be asking you up to his office on Monday for a meeting . . . you know." Blakely was Bigelow's superior.
Heavy on the was, Steve thought as his line buzzed. He excused himself to speak with Blakely's busty girl Friday, who was calling from the thirtieth floor regarding the meeting that Cavanaugh had just mentioned. And, incidentally, was Mr. Keller possibly free for cocktails after work? Was today too soon? Her name was Connie, and of course he already had her extension. Of course. Polite laugh.
At a flick of the wrist, Cavanaugh faded into the background. That was the last Steve ever saw of him.
Waiting for him at home were Vivia, the martini shaker—perfect—and a toast to success.
It took both his hands to navigate the first glass to his mouth, since both were immobilized into semifunctional scoops by the bandages. The more he drank, the more efficient he became at zeroing-in on his face, and to his chagrin the anesthetizing effect of the alcohol permitted some of last night's bitterness to peek out, and beeline for Vivia.
"Here's to us, to us," he said mostly to his glass. He was on the sofa, and Vivia sat cross-legged, sunk into a leather recliner across from him. His shoes were cockeyed on the floor between them. "Methinks I've just hooked and crooked my merry way into a higher tax bracket, thank you very much to my . . . odd little concubine . . . and her odd little plant. Perhaps we should consider incorporating. Corporeally speaking, that is." His sightline flew to the bedroom door and back.
Vivia raised her glass to him. She was wearing an Oriental print thing far too skimpy and diaphanous to qualify as a robe.
"So now, as—ahem!—partners in non-crime," he said as she refilled their glasses, "you have to fill me in on the plant. Where the hell did you come across something like that? You don't buy that sort of thing down at the Vigoro plant shop. How come people aren't using them to . . . Christ, to bump off everybody?"
She finished off her drink before he was halfway through his, and stretched languorously, purring. "This tastes like pure nectar," she said. "Stick to the subject, wench."
She cocked her head in the peculiar way he'd become so familiar with and mulled her story over before saying, "I had the only seed." That was it.
He remembered the amber and nodded. So far, so logical. "Where'd you get it?"
"I've had it quite a long time. Since birth, in fact." She ran her tongue around the rim of her glass, then recharged the glass by half from the shaker.
"An heirloom?"
"Mm."
She was preparing to lead him off to the sack again, and he fully intended to bed her, but not before he could hurdle her coy non-replies and clear his conscience. "Tell me what happened between you and Bigelow." Instinct had told him to shift gears, and he expected a harsh look.
"I've never really seen the man."
The office coffee was starting to have an unlovely reaction to the quickly gulped booze, and he burped quietly. "Wait a minute." He waved his free hand to make her go back and explain. The surrender-flag whiteness of the bandages hurt his eyes in the room's dim light. "You two had some kind of . . . assignation, or something. You wanted vengeance on him."
"Hm." The corners of her generous mouth twitched upward, then dropped back to neutral, as though she was still learning how to make a smile. "In point of fact, Steven, I never said I wanted vengeance on anything. Perhaps you thought it."
Now this definitely registered sourly. For a crazed, out-of-sync moment he thought she was going to add, No, I wanted vengeance on YOU! like some daffy twist in a 1940s murder mystery. But she just sat there, hugging her knees to her chin, distracting him with her body. Waiting.
"Oh, I get it—you just help a total stranger, out of the blue, to do in his boss, whom you've never met, with the last special black plant seed in the entire universe?" The sarcasm was back in his tone.
"I was interested in you, Steven. No other."
"Why?" Urrrrp, again, stronger this time.
"Except for one thing, you've been perfect for me. You were . . . what is the word? Fertile. You were ripe."
"Where'd I slip up?" Now his head was throbbing, and he feared he might have to interrupt his fact-finding sortie by sicking up on the shag carpeting.
She gave him her quizzical little shrug. "You were supposed to go uproot the plant tonight, you sneak. During the full moon. Not last night, though I don't suppose it'll matter." She rose; her legs flashed in and out of the wispy garment as she approached. "Let me give you a refill. This is a celebration, you know, and I'm ahead of you."
"Ugh, no—wait," he muttered, his brains sloshing around in his skull pan like dirty dishwater. "No more for me." He put out one of his mitts to arrest the progress of the shaker toward his glass and blundered it out of Vivia's grasp. He was reminded of the time he had tried to keep a coffee shop waitress from freshening up his cup by putting his hand over the cup to indicate no more . . . and gotten his fingers scalded.
The shaker bounced on the rug without breaking. Its lid rolled away and ice cubes tumbled out, clicking like dice. Mingled with the ice were several limp, wet, dead black leaves. Gin droplets glistened on them. They were spade-shaped, with serrated edges.
Steve gaped at them numbly. "Oh my god . . ." Poisoned! Unable to grab, he swung at Vivia, who easily danced out of range. He gasped, his voice dropping an octave into huskiness as he felt a shot of pain in his diaphragm. He understood that his body needed to vomit and expel the toxin.
But he wanted to get Vivia first.
He launched himself off the sofa and succeeded only in falling across the coffee table, cleaning it off and landing in a drunken sprawl on nonresponsive mannequin limbs. The feeling in his fingers and toes was gone.
"Oh, Steven, not poison," he heard her say. "What a silly thing to think, darling. I wouldn't do that. I need you. Isn't that what you always wanted—a woman who truly needed you? I mean truly? Not in all the petty ways you so despise?"
His tongue went dead. His throat fought to contract and seal off his airway. If he could force himself to throw up, he might suffocate . . . or save his life. He was incapable of snaring Vivia now, but he sure as hell could use two fingers to chock down his tongue. He saw the expression on her face as he did it.
She watched intently, almost lovingly, with that unusual cocked-head attitude he remembered from their first meeting in the elevator. It reminded him of a cocker spaniel hearing a high-frequency whistle, or a hungry insect inspecting food with its antennae. It was an attitude characteristic of another species.
