LITMIR.BIZ

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or his needs. He’d been concerned that eventually she would change her will and stiff him forever, sheerly for the pleasure of doing so.

      In her working years, his mother had been a university professor of economics, specializing in Marxist economic models and the vicious departmental politics of academia.

      She had believed in nothing more than the righteousness of envy and the power of hatred. When both beliefs proved hollow, she had not abandoned either, but had supplemented them with ice cream.

      Corky didn’t hate his mother. He didn’t hate anyone.

      He didn’t envy anyone, either.

      Having seen those gods fail his mother, he had rejected both. He did not wish to grow old with no comfort but his favorite premium brand of coconut fudge.

      Four years ago, paying her a secret visit with the intention of quickly and mercifully smothering her in her sleep, he had instead beaten her to death with a fireplace poker, as if he were acting out a story begun by Anne Tyler in an ironic mood and roughly finished by a furious Norman Mailer.

      Though unplanned, the exercise with the poker proved cathartic. Not that he’d taken pleasure in the violence. He had not.

      The decision to murder her had really been as unemotional as any decision to purchase the stock of a blue-chip corporation, and the killing itself had been conducted with the same cool efficiency with which he would have executed any stock-market investment.

      Being an economist, his mother surely had understood.

      His alibi had been unassailable. He inherited her estate. Life went on. His life, anyway.

      Now, as he finished the candy bar, he felt sugar-soothed and chocolate-coddled.

      He still wanted to kill Reynerd, but the unwise urgency of the compulsion had passed. He would take time to plan the hit.

      When he acted, he would follow his scheme faithfully. This time, pillow would not become poker.

      Noticing that the yellow slicker had shed a lot of water on the seat, he sighed but did nothing. Corky was too committed an anarchist to care about the upholstery.

      Besides, he had Reynerd to brood about. A perpetual adolescent inside a dour exterior, Rolf had been unable to resist the temptation to deliver the sixth box in person. Looking for a thrill.

      The fool had thought that perimeter security cameras did not exist solely because he himself could not spot them.

      Are there no other planets in the solar system, Corky had asked him, just because you can’t locate them in the sky?

      When Ethan Truman, Manheim’s security chief, came calling, Reynerd had been stunned. By his admission, he behaved suspiciously.

      As Corky wadded up the candy wrapper and stuffed it into the trash bag, he wished that he could dispose of Reynerd as easily.

      Suddenly rain fell more heavily than at any previous moment of the storm. The deluge knocked stubborn acorns from the oak under which he had parked, and cast them across the BMW. They rattled off the paint work and surely marred it, snapped off the windshield but did not crack it.

      He didn’t have to sit here, in a danger of acorns, plotting Reynerd’s demise, until a rotting thousand-pound limb broke free, fell on the car, and crushed him for his trouble. He could get on with his day and mentally draw up blueprints for the murder while he attended to other business.

      Corky drove a few miles to a popular upscale shopping mall and parked in the underground garage.

      He got out of the BMW, stripped off his slicker and his droopy rain hat, which he tossed onto the floor of the car. He shrugged into a tweed sports coat that complemented his sweater and jeans.

      An elevator carried him from subterranean realms to the highest of two floors of shops, restaurants, and attractions. The arcade was on this top level.

      With school out, kids crowded around the arcade games. Most were in their early teens.

      The machines beeped, rang, tolled, chimed, bleated, tweedled, whistled, rattattooed, boomed, shrieked, squealed, ululated, roared like gunning engines, emitted scraps of bombastic music, the screams of virtual victims, twinkled, flashed, strobed, and scintillated in all known colors, and swallowed quarters, dollars, more voraciously even than the iconic Pac-Man had once gobbled cookies off a million arcade screens in an era now quaint if not unknown to the current crowd.

      Wandering among the machines, Corky distributed free drugs to the kids.

      These small plastic bags each contained eight doses of Ecstasy—or Extasy, if you’d gone to a public school—with a block-lettered label that promised FREE X, and then suggested, JUST REMEMBER WHO YOUR FRIEND IS.

      He was pretending to be a dealer drumming up business. He never expected to see any of these brats again.

      Some kids accepted the packets, thought it was cool.

      Others showed no interest. Of those who declined, none made an effort to report him to anyone; nobody liked a rat.

      In a few instances, Corky slipped the bags into kids’ jacket pockets without their knowledge. Let them find it later, be amazed.

      Some would take the stuff. Some would throw it away or give it away. In the end, he would have succeeded in contaminating a few more brains.

      Truth: He wasn’t interested in creating addicts. He would have given away heroin or even crack cocaine if that had been his goal.

      Scientific studies of Ecstasy revealed that five years after taking just a single dose, the user continued to exhibit lingering changes in brain chemistry. After regular use, permanent brain damage could ensue.

      Some oncologists and neurologists suggested that in the decades to come, the current high incidence of Ecstasy use would produce a dramatic increase in early-onset cancerous brain tumors, as well as a decrease in the cognitive abilities of hundreds of thousands if not millions of citizens.

      Eight-dose giveaways like this would not facilitate the collapse of civilization overnight. Corky was committed to long-term effect.

      He never carried more than fifteen bags, and once he started to hand them out, he made a point of ridding himself of them quickly. Too clever to get caught holding, he was in and out of the arcade in three minutes.

      Because he didn’t need to pause to make a sale, the staff didn’t have an opportunity to notice him. By the time he left the arcade, he was just another shopper: nothing incriminating in his pockets.

      At a Starbucks, he bought a double latte, and sipped it at one of their tables on the promenade, watching the parade of humanity in all its absurdity.

      After finishing the coffee, he went to a department store. He needed socks.

       CHAPTER 12

      THE TREES, A GROVE OF EIGHT, ROSE ON beautifully gnarled trunks, lifted high their exquisitely twisted branches, shook their graceful gray-green tresses in the wet wind, seeming both to defy the storm and to celebrate it. Fruitless in this season, they cast off no olives, only leaves, upon the cobbled walkway.

      Twining through the branches, Christmas lights were unlit at this hour, bulbs of dull color waiting to brighten in the night.

      This five-story Westwood condominium, less than one block from Wilshire Boulevard, was neither as grand as some in the neighborhood nor large enough to require a doorman. Nevertheless, the purchase price of an apartment here would gag a sword swallower.

      Ethan trod the leaves of peace, passed under the extinguished lights of Christmas, and entered a marble-floored and marble-paneled public foyer. He used a key to let himself through the inner security door.

      Past the foyer, the secure lobby was small but cozy, with an area rug to soften the marble, two Art Deco armchairs,

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