Garden of Evil Read online

  His penis began to soften, and he lifted himself off her. ‘You’ve been asking for it ever since you moved in,’ he told her. ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘I expected sex,’ said Summer. ‘You know, like normal consensitive sex, without being pushed around or slapped or nothing like that.’

  Jim pulled up his chinos and buckled his belt. He had never forced himself on a woman like that before, and he had no clear idea of why he had done it now. All he knew was that he somehow felt entitled to have her, whenever he wanted her, whether she wanted him or not. His blood was pumping so loudly in his ears that he was almost deafened.

  Summer stood up, too. She picked up her thong and her white safari shorts, but she didn’t immediately put them on, almost as if she wanted to taunt Jim with what he could have enjoyed if only he hadn’t been so aggressive.

  ‘Oh, Jimmy,’ she said.

  Jim turned away. He couldn’t think what to say to her.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘Forget about the rezzamay. There’s no point me trying for that job anyhow, with my face all swelled up.’

  Jim wanted to say that he was sorry, but somehow he couldn’t. Even the thought of saying sorry made him feel as if his mouth were filled with grit.

  At that moment the doorbell rang. Jim went to answer it while Summer hurried to pull on her shorts.

  Detective Brennan and Detective Carroll were standing outside. They both looked grim-faced.

  ‘Mr Rook? OK if we come in?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sure.’

  They followed him into the living room. Summer was quickly brushing her hair across the left side of her face, to hide her bruise.

  Jim said, ‘This is my downstairs neighbor, Detectives. She just came up to borrow some—’

  ‘Coffee,’ Summer put in. ‘Yes – I was just leaving.’

  With that, she went, and slammed the front door behind her. When she had gone, Detective Carroll turned around and said, ‘She forgot her coffee.’

  ‘Did she?’ said Jim. ‘So she did! She’s so darn scatty, that girl.’

  ‘Fights with her boyfriend, too, by the looks of it.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Well . . . somebody just gave her a big fat bruise on the cheek, and she wasn’t wearing a wedding band, so I kind of put two and two together.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jim. ‘Really? I wouldn’t know.’

  Detective Brennan paced around Jim’s living room, taking in all of his bookshelves and all of his pictures and all of his trophies.

  ‘I just thought you ought to know that we’ve identified the victim who was nailed to the cypress tree.’

  ‘Oh, God. Don’t tell me it’s another of my students.’

  ‘No . . . as a matter of fact, it’s not. When the MEs had washed off the paint, they found a tattoo on his upper left arm: Los Primos.’

  ‘Los Primos? That’s an Hispanic street gang, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh . . . you’re quite the expert, Mr Rook.’

  ‘I’m a college teacher, Detective. I teach remedial English. All of the street gangs have their own language. It’s part of my job to know what the hell they’re talking about.’

  ‘Well, you’re right, Clikos Los Primos are a small gang from East LA, pretty much exclusively Hispanic. We showed a picture of our vic to various members of the gang and they identified him right away.

  Detective Brennan produced a color scan of a young Hispanic man. He was quite handsome, although his eyes were closed and his cheeks were puffy and his skin was unnaturally gray.

  ‘His name is Alvaro Esteban, more usually known as Santana. He works as a gardener, right here at Briar Cliff Apartments. He’s your gardener, Mr Rook.’

  TEN

  Jim found it impossible to sleep that night. Every time he closed his eyes he saw that dark Satanic face that Ricky had painted, gradually materializing in the shadows. After three hours of twisting and turning and thumping his pillow he switched on his bedside lamp, climbed out of bed and went into the living room to watch Brothers and Sisters, even though he had no idea what the story was all about and what terrible secret Kitty was trying to keep from Tommy.

  When the sun eventually began to fill his apartment, he took a long shower with his forehead pressed against the tiles, and then he made himself a mug of strong black Java coffee. He watched Good Morning, America, and even Good Cookin’ With Bruce Aidells, but he was still ready to leave for college nearly an hour earlier than usual. Tibbles was still refusing to come out of hiding, but Jim filled up his bowl with tuna dinner and poured him a saucer of fresh milk.

  ‘You want to sulk, you feline faggot, then sulk!’ he called out, before he closed the front door. ‘But just remember who started it – OK?’

  On his way down the steps, he hesitated outside the door of Summer’s apartment, wondering if he ought to knock and apologize for forcing himself on her yesterday evening. After a few moments, though, he decided against it. She was probably still in bed, and he still found it hard to think of saying sorry. Come on, she was always flaunting herself, wasn’t she? She was always asking him if he thought that God had endowed her with big enough breasts, and did she need a boob job, and she would religiously tell him every time she went to Raya for a Brazilian. If that wasn’t asking to be jumped on, he didn’t know what was.

  When he arrived at West Grove, the staff parking lot was almost deserted. He climbed out of his car and stood there for a moment, with the sun in his eyes and the early morning wind rattling in the yuccas all around him, and he was sure that he caught a snatch of that calliope music again. In The Good Old Summertime. Then one of the groundsmen started up his grass-cutter, and the moment was gone.

  Inside, the college corridors were echoing and empty and smelled strongly of floor wax. As he opened the door of Art Studio Four, however, he was surprised to find that Simon Silence was already sitting in his place, with his spring-bound notebook and all of his felt-tip pens arranged neatly on the bench in front of him. He was listening to an iPod, with his eyes closed, nodding his head in time to some inaudible music. The sun was shining on him through the window, so that it looked as if he were being illuminated by a celestial ray from heaven.

  Jim stood in the doorway for a moment, but Simon Silence showed no indication that he was aware of him standing there. He just kept on nodding in time to his iPod music.

  Jim sat down and flopped his briefcase on to his desk. He had mended its handle with a wire coat hanger and duct tape. He opened it up and took out two poetry books and a red folder of questions on grammar and spelling.

  Nearly a full minute went past. Then, without opening his eyes, Simon Silence said, ‘Sorry about your gardener, Mr Rook.’

  Jim looked up. ‘Oh, yeah? How’d you know about that? I thought you never watched TV.’

  ‘Our cleaner told me. She heard all about it on the local news channel.’ Now Simon Silence opened his eyes and gave Jim one of his creepy, enigmatic smiles.

  ‘Your cleaner told you?’

  ‘That’s right. She’s a very bright young lady, our cleaner. She wants to be a paralegal, one day, and represent Mexican immigrants.’

  ‘So what did she hear on the news?’

  ‘Aha! Apparently, the police have been trying to work out why the victim was nailed up here, at West Grove College. So far, though, they’ve only managed to come up with one connection. The victim worked as a gardener at an apartment building in the Hollywood Hills. And who should happen to live in that apartment building but a certain English teacher from this very same college.’

  ‘You’re kidding me. They said that, on the news?’

  ‘That’s what my cleaner told me. I don’t think they mentioned you by name, Mr Rook, but I couldn’t help putting two and two together.’

  He paused, and then he reached down into his gunny sack and said, ‘Here – would you like an apple? I have plenty.’

  Jim pushed back his chair and walked up the side of the classroom. ‘Tell me something, Sim
on,’ he said, ‘what are you really here for? I mean here, in Special Class Two?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re driving at, Mr Rook.’

  ‘First of all, you speak fluently and grammatically which means to me that you can probably write that way, too. Second of all, you have complete self-confidence, which is a quality that almost everybody who tips up in this Godforsaken class sorely seems to lack. You even took it upon yourself to set the rest of the class an essay when I wasn’t here. You don’t need remedial English, do you, Simon? I don’t know what I can possibly have to offer you.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, Mr Rook. You have more to offer me than you can imagine.’

  ‘Like what, for instance?’

  ‘You have a gift, sir. A very rare gift. In fact, it’s unique. You can see the world as it really is. Not just half of it, like most people.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that you can see the dead as well as the living. You can see presences and shapes and apparitions. You can even see monstrosities that people don’t believe in – or, at least that they don’t want to believe in. Even the most pious of churchmen find it difficult to see monstrosities like that, if not impossible.’

  Jim stared at Simon Silence for a long time before he said anything. What a speech. The sunlight that had first illuminated him had gradually inched away, leaving his face in shadow, and the expression in his eyes began to look darker and much more calculating.

  ‘Who are you, really?’ Jim asked him. ‘How do you know all that about me?’

  ‘I am Simon Silence, Mr Rook, that’s all. The first and only son of the Reverend John Silence of the Church of the Divine Conquest. I am nobody, sir. You shouldn’t be afraid of me.’

  ‘Believe me, I’m not. But I still want to know exactly what it is you’re doing here. You’re having an effect on my class, Simon, and I’m not too sure that I like it. I’m even beginning to think that you’re having some kind of an effect on me.’

  Simon Silence said nothing, but kept on smiling, and with the fingertips of his left hand he traced a complicated pattern on top of the bench, around and around. A face? A pentacle? Circles within circles, like snakes that swallow their own tails?

  ‘How about that essay on Paradise?’ Jim asked him. ‘Did you finish yours yet?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Simon Silence. He picked up his notebook and handed it over. Jim didn’t read it in front of him – didn’t even look at it until he had taken it back to his desk and sat down. Simon Silence returned his earphones to his ears, folded his arms and closed his eyes and started nodding again, as if he didn’t care one way or the other what Jim thought of what he had written.

  Simon Silence’s handwriting was reasonably tidy, although it leaned backward and climbed uphill from left to right. It also had exaggerated loops on the descenders, like the g’s and the p’s and the y’s.

  Jim was no graphologist, but he had read enough scrawly and block-lettered English essays over the years to recognize some of the personality traits that were given away by a student’s handwriting. A backward slope usually betrayed shyness and uncertainty, although it could also indicate a considerable attention to detail – what Jim called planespotters’ handwriting. On the other hand, heavily emphasized descenders showed practicality and a matter-of-fact approach to life: auto-mechanics and builders and plumbers.

  Jim glanced up at Simon Silence, and thought: This handwriting is deliberately meant to mislead me. He doesn’t really write like this at all.

  If he had been asked to guess what Simon Silence’s natural handwriting was like, he would have said sharply forward-sloping, with most of the emphasis on the ascenders like b, d, h, k and l. An aggressive, domineering personality, but with a strong spiritual element, almost fanatical.

  He didn’t know if the essay itself was intended to be misleading. It read: ‘For me Paradise will come on the day when the Fires are lit all over the world from one horizon to another and are stoked with Those Who Never Should Have Been. Paradise will come when the Smoke has cleared and the Bones are Heaped High and the Great Blasphemy has at last been Atoned For.’

  Jim read the essay a second time and then took out his red pen. Underneath the last line, he wrote, ‘Very apocalyptic, Simon, but you need to explain yourself more fully. What, pray, is the Great Blasphemy? And who is it Who Never Should Have Been, when they’re at home?’

  As critical as he was about it, this essay confirmed his belief that Simon Silence had no place here in Special Class Two. It was a rambling, Old-Testament type rant, but it was fairly grammatical. There was no text speak in it, nor street slang, and he had actually spelled ‘blasphemy’ with a ‘ph’. He doubted if anybody else in the class would have done that, even if they had known the word ‘blasphemy’ to begin with.

  Jim was about to take Simon Silence’s notebook back to him when the classroom door banged open and the rest of Special Class Two came barging in, chattering and laughing and pushing each other. Simon Silence opened his eyes again, and smiled at him.

  You can see presences and shapes and apparition, Mr Rook. You can even see monstrosities that people don’t believe in – or, at least, that they don’t want to believe in.

  Jim made his way to the back of the classroom, where Rebecca Teitelbaum was sitting. In contrast to the drab green dress in which she had showed up for class yesterday, she was dressed in a glaring scarlet-and-yellow blouse with a zigzag print on it, and she had used red-and-yellow beads to fasten her chaotic black hair into a topknot.

  She was also wearing tight red jeans and yellow sandals. Everything she wore looked new, as if she had gone out shopping yesterday evening with the intention of changing her image entirely, from dutiful Jewish daughter to X-Factor wannabe rock chick.

  Jim noticed that Nudnik, the grubby white teddy bear, was still sitting beside her. He, too, was sporting a necklace of red-and-yellow beads.

  ‘Hey – I thought you were taking Nudnik off to be auctioned.’

  ‘I was. But then I thought, no, he’s mine. I’ve had him ever since I was little and he understands me more than anybody else does. Why should I give him to some stupid orphan kids at Lev LaLev who won’t even realize how much he knows?’

  ‘Oh, OK. I see. Well, he’s your bear. Guess you can do what you like with him. But maybe he’d like to stay at home from now on. If I let you bring a mascot into class, everybody else will want to do it, and we don’t want a remedial English group looking like the teddy bears’ picnic, do we?’

  ‘Nudnik isn’t a mascot,’ Rebecca Teitelbaum retorted. ‘He’s not a toy, either. He’s my confidant. I tell him, like, everything.’

  Jim looked at Nudnik and the bear stared back at him, glassy-eyed. Jim knew it was ridiculous, but today the bear looked quite sinister, as if it really did know all of Rebecca Teiltelbaum’s secrets. What was more, it looked as if it could understand what they were talking about, even if it chose to stay silent.

  ‘How about letting me see your essay on Paradise?’ asked Jim.

  Rebecca Teitelbaum handed him a torn-out sheet from her notebook. Her writing had unusual thick and thin strokes, almost as if she were writing in Hebrew characters rather than English. She had written Paradise as a heading, but underneath she had also written Ganedyn, which Jim assumed was the same word in Yiddish.

  ‘My dream is to be most famous of all woman in the World. I step out of car and paperazi flash and flash with camera. I walk on to stage platform and thousands people stand up to ther feet and screem my name they love me so good. I am always on TV in movie and everybody beg me writ my name for them. All men say marry me marry me Rebecca you are most butiful of all woman in the World. Ever day I wear desiner cloths and diamon and everybody love me.’

  ‘That’s really your idea of Paradise?’ Jim asked her.

  Rebecca Teitelbaum nodded.

  ‘Come on,’ said Jim, ‘you’re a pretty good-looking girl already. Don’t you think you might get a little t
ired of all that adulation?’

  She shook her head. ‘All my life nobody ever gave me any attention like that. And don’t tell me that I’m good-looking. You’re just saying that to make me feel better. I have horrible hair like wire and my nose is too big and I have to wear these really thick eyeglasses. No boy ever said to me come out on a date, let alone marry me.’

  ‘Rebecca,’ said Jim, ‘everybody has beauty inside of them, and that includes you.’

  He couldn’t count the number of times he had said that to girls in Special Class Two who were lacking in confidence in their looks. ‘Everybody has beauty inside of them, no matter how big their butts or how homely they are.’ He believed in it, too. At least, he used to believe in it. But looking at Rebecca Teitelbaum this morning, even in her new red-and-yellow outfit, he couldn’t help thinking that – yes, her nose was kind of prominent, to put it politely, and her hair was frizzy. Not only that, her front teeth protruded like an indecisive beaver’s and she had a large wart just in front of her right ear, and another one on her neck. In fact, he wasn’t at all surprised that she had never been asked out on a date.

  He handed back her essay. ‘You’ve made a couple of bloopers with your spelling, Rebecca, and your grammar needs some fixing, here and there. But those are minor details that we can fix later. Otherwise – yes, you’ve given me a very interesting insight into what you want out of life. Fame, and adoration and huge popularity.’

  None of which will ever come your way, gelibte. Not until hell freezes over, anyhow.

  Next, he walked around to the chubby Hispanic boy who was sitting on the end of the third bench back, next to Simon Silence. His chair was tilted back and his legs were spread wide and he was softly drumming on his thighs. He had shiny jet-black hair tied back with a leather thong into a ponytail, and a round, cheerful face.

  ‘Want to tell me your name?’ Jim asked him.

  ‘It’s not there, my name, in the register?’