its parameters? He loved Tom, yes. Tom loved him. But, really, what did that mean, what did it come down to in the end? Not Cinderella and the Prince, certainly. Love, real love, between real people, was far more complex than that, not simply one emotion but dozens, maybe hundreds of them, inexorably intertwined, impossible to tug apart into a single strand.

  He had loved his father, too. He needn’t have told his father of his homosexuality, after all, which was what had cost him his father’s love, surely. His father’s reaction could hardly have come as any kind of surprise either. Common sense would have warned him in advance what that reaction would be.

  If the ultimate goal had been to keep his father’s affections, mightn’t it have been wiser to have lived a lie in the years that had remained to them? His father’s love, however tenuous it might have been, would have remained his. At not so great a cost, really.

  Only a lie. Not even one spoken, but rather a lie of omission, surely the least liable sort.

  Yet, that was the one thing he hadn’t been able to do. Any more than he could live a lie with Tom. If he was going to do what he was considering doing, he couldn’t lie about it, not even by omission. Tom would have to know, if not before, certainly afterward.

  So, what was that? A kind of masochism? A destructive compulsion? Or, realism. Because if the other one didn’t truly know you, know what you were, it wasn’t you he loved, was it?

  What he loved was just some figment of his own imagination, some idea of what you ought to be, of what he wanted you to be, which might have very little bearing on what you really were.

  Because Stanley knew all too painfully that he was not the ideal that Tom saw when he looked at him—or, at least the ideal that Tom wanted to see, that he pretended to himself to see—far from it.

  Or, was it all no more than the flickering flame of a candle?

  Like the one he held now, a tiny burst of heat, hot enough for its smallness to burn the fingers if you put it to them, but that, in the end, signified nothing.

  110 Victor J. Banis

  A morose thought, that. He put the candle down and turned away. And saw a face he recognized.

  chaPter Fourteen

  It took him a moment, though, to identify the face. A woman had paused just inside the door to dip her fingers into the fount and lift them to her brow. When she turned his way, looking directly at him, he saw that it was Abe Pendleton’s sister, Patience’s Aunt Dora.

  The smile she gave him as he walked toward her was tentative.

  “I thought I saw you come in,” she said, speaking in that almost whisper people adopted within the sanctuary of a church. “But I wasn’t quite sure. I haven’t seen you here before. Do you come often?”

  “No,” he said, without offering any further explanation. He thought it would somehow be a betrayal of his father to try to explain his mission. Besides which, he wasn’t sure he even understood it himself.

  “I wonder if I might have a word with you,” she said.

  He did not feel at the moment any desire for company, and even had he done so it would surely not have been this spinster, shriveled like a fruit beyond its season. But there was something so hopeful in the way she looked up at him that he could not bring himself to refuse.

  “Yes, of course. There’s a coffee shop just a block away,” he said. “We could walk there. Unless you have some other place in mind?”

  “No, that will do fine. I could use the walk, in fact. I have to drive back to San Mateo. It would feel good to stretch my legs.”

  Outside, they found that a faint drizzle had begun to fall.

  Stanley hesitated on the steps of the church. “We might get a little damp,” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t mind. I’ve got an umbrella in my car, just here,”

  she said, and paused to unlock an old gray Honda and take an 112 Victor J. Banis

  umbrella from the front passenger seat. Stanley took it from her, opened it and held it over them, careful to see that she was protected, though the rain was hardly enough to do more than leave beads of moisture on the shoulder of his jacket.

  They walked without conversation, for which he was grateful.

  He had just supposed that she was one of those chattering types, but the silence was not uncomfortable.

  The gray sky above them seemed to press down heavily, like an old blanket. After that pervasive gloom, the interior of the little coffee shop was almost painfully bright. They took a table near the window, and exchanged no more than a few polite words until a waitress had brought them coffee and gone away.

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” Stanley said. “Were you close?”

  “Not awfully, I’m sorry to say,” though she took a moment to find a handkerchief in her purse and dab at the corners of her eyes with it. “Abe wasn’t a man who encouraged closeness. Or even love, I should say. Oh, I’m not expressing myself very well.

  We liked one another, certainly. People did like him, and respect him. But I don’t know if anybody really loved him.”

  “Not even his children?”

  “I’ve never known his children very well,” she said, which he took to be a tactful way of avoiding giving him a frank answer. “Please, tell me honestly, do you believe my brother was murdered?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “How extraordinary. I’ve never been so close to a murder before. It’s one of those crimes that contaminates things, doesn’t it? Even the innocent can’t escape its influence.”

  “I think sometimes it’s the innocent who suffer the worst of it.”

  “Yes. Only, one does wonder sometimes, who the innocent are. It can be so difficult to sort out, don’t you think?”

  DeaDly Silence 113

  He thought that really did not want an answer. A brief silence descended, but like the earlier silence when they had walked here, it was not uncomfortable. He found himself rather liking Aunt Dora. Even the faint scent of violets that came from her, though somewhat old fashioned, was not unpleasant.

  At length, though, he prompted her, “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m taking up your time.” Stanley dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “And, I suppose I ought to have gone to the police with this,” she said, “only, I’m not sure it’s of any great significance, and I don’t want to cause anyone trouble.

  Certainly not my nephew.”

  “That would be Zack.”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “I’m quite fond of him, really. He’s a bit eccentric, I suppose, but he’s really a sweet boy.”

  Stanley thought of the Zack known throughout the Castro, who, it was said, stropped his tongue regularly to keep it ready for use as a lethal weapon. But people had more than one mask they wore, depending upon present company, and he could well imagine that was a side of himself Zack had never displayed to his maiden aunt.

  “And I can’t imagine how his father pretended he didn’t know Zack was, well, you know. It hardly took any prescience to see how he was. Even as a little boy…sometimes he’d come visit with me, and he liked to dress up in my things. I suppose I oughtn’t to have allowed it, but I never saw that it did any harm. Does he still like to dress up, do you know?”

  “Oh, there’s always Halloween. The most unlikely people get themselves gussied up for that. But I can’t say I’ve ever seen Zack in a dress.”

  “It’s probably just as well. He doesn’t have the figure for it. It’s one thing for a young boy, they’re often so androgynous, aren’t they? But Zack, today…no, I don’t think it would be a pretty sight.” She laughed quietly to herself, but it was good natured laughter, not mean.

  114 Victor J. Banis

  Stanley found himself puzzling over this conversation. Surely Aunt Dora hadn’t asked to speak with him to discuss Zack’s early penchant for cross dressing. He waited, watching some thought or other flit across her face while she struggled with whatever it was she really wanted to say.

  “When Zack said,” she began, frowned, and started over. “He told that policeman that he’d been in the coffee shop, since he’d arrived until the time he went upstairs and found Patience, and learned that Abe was dead. But…” she paused again and the look she gave Stanley was beseeching. “It wasn’t true. He wasn’t in the lounge. And I suppose you want to know how I know that.”

  Stanley had a ridiculous urge to insist that he didn’t want to indulge in gossip. Which, he had an unkind thought, was probably meat and potatoes to the woman sitting across from him.

  “Let me guess,” he said instead, “because you were there.”

  She gave her head a triumphant bob. “Exactly. I was there.

  In the coffee shop, the lounge, whatever you want to call it. I’d come too early. I can never properly judge how long it’s going to take me to drive from Santa Cruz, I thought it would take ages.

  Sometimes it does. The traffic, you know. So I set out early, but it was so very early that there was almost no traffic on the freeway, just that stretch near the airport, and I got to the nursing home in no time flat. Way too early, as it turned out, to think of going up to Abe’s room.”

  “Tell me, exactly how was it that you came to visit your brother at that particular time? I don’t mean the hour, I mean on that particular day?”

  “Why, Patience called me, she said he wanted to see me.

  Oh, not just me, all of the family.” She thought about that for a moment. “Or, at least, that was the impression I got, although now that I think about it, I’m not sure she ever actually put it quite like that. Anyway, the truth was, I felt a little silly, getting there so early. I actually thought about going someplace else for an hour or so, but, really, I couldn’t think of anywhere to go. I mean, there wasn’t much likely to be open, you see, other than DeaDly Silence 115

  coffee shops, and the nursing home has one of those. So I parked the car in the lot and went downstairs and had a couple of cups of coffee. And there was no one else there. Oh, there was a pair of nurses who came in for a brief while. But the point is, Zack wasn’t there. I didn’t see him the whole time.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “It was after eight when a nurse, one who’d seen me there before, came up to my table to ask if I wasn’t a relative of Mister Pendleton’s, and when I said I was, she said she thought I ought to go up to Doctor Skelton’s office. That was the first inkling I had that anything was wrong.”

  Stanley was thinking that, yes, she ought to tell the police about this. He wondered briefly why Zack had bothered to lie, and remembered then the tickets they issued in the parking lot, that were stamped with the date and time. Bryce had asked to see the tickets. Zack’s would have shown when he arrived, meaning that he had to account for his time somehow. But, what had he been doing with his time, if not drinking coffee downstairs?

  “I thought,” Aunt Dora said, “if I shared this with you, you could pass it on to the policeman. If you thought it was important enough to matter. I mean, it is silly, really. It’s not as if Zack had murdered his father. The dear boy wouldn’t be capable of that.

  Don’t you agree?”

  To which Stanley thought it better to offer no answer.

  Something came into his mind, that Tom, the experienced homicide investigator, had told him early on in their partnership:

  “You can never predict what people are capable of. Sometimes murderers surprise even themselves.”

  “And, while you were killing time, you saw no one?” he asked instead.

  “Just the nurses. Oh, I did see Patience and her young man talking together in the hallway, but they were so engrossed with one another they didn’t even notice me, so I didn’t bother them.

  Young lovers. Nothing else exists for them.” She smiled wistfully and gave her head a shake.

  116 Victor J. Banis

  “Young man?”

  “Yes. Mister Whitaker, wasn’t that his name? Such a nice young man, it seemed to me. I met him once before, at the house.”

  “Well, if it was Mister Whitaker you saw, he was with Prudence.”

  “Oh, no dear,” she said, and frowned, certainty giving way to confusion. “But—are you sure?”

  “Yes. Prudence was with Farley Whitaker. They came to the nursing home together. Don’t you remember, they told the policeman that?”

  “Yes. Of course. Now that you remind me…” She stared off into space for a moment. “It used to be, they could never fool me. When they were little girls, they would often try. Even when they’d dress in the same clothes, everything, I could always tell them apart. But, I suppose my eyes aren’t what they used to be.

  Time catches up with us, you know.”

  Stanley thought about Prudence, with her flaming hair in tumbling disarray, and Patience, with hers in that tight, inhibited bun on the back of her neck. How would one confuse the two?

  Something more than Aunt Dora’s eyesight was showing its age.

  “You’re a strange kind of policeman, aren’t you?” she said, smiling faintly.

  “I’m not a policeman, I’m a private investigator.”

  “Still…I think one would be foolish to forget that fact.”

  He tried for reassurance. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

  “Oh, dear boy, there’s always something to worry about. We can wash our clothes and bathe our bodies, but not all of the stains come out. It’s just our humanness. What does Paul say, about withholding judgment until God shines his light on the hidden things of darkness?”

  “And makes manifest the counsels of the heart.”

  DeaDly Silence 117

  “Exactly.” She gathered purse and gloves. “And now, please, if you’ll walk me back to my car…”

  chaPter FiFteen

  Stanley watched Aunt Dora drive off then strolled down the block to where his own car sat. He paused with one hand on the Toyota’s door handle, thinking that he’d share her information with Tom and let Tom take it to Bryce. Best if he himself didn’t try to deal directly with the homicide inspector.

  In the distance, something made a loud cracking sound, like a tree limb breaking in a violent wind, and in almost the same instant, a chip flew off the utility pole on the car’s opposite side.

  It was a second or two before he realized what had happened.

  Someone had shot at him. Heart pounding, he dropped to his knees and, thinking the gunshot had come from this direction, duck-walked around the car, hoping that he was putting the car between himself and the shooter.

  He crouched, holding his breath, waiting for the next shot to come. He heard a squeal of rubber on pavement as a car took off hastily. The detective part of his brain said he should rise up and look to see what kind of car it was, but he put a hand over the inner detective’s big mouth to shut him and his silly suggestions up, and stayed down where he was.

  All he saw, bending down lower to look under his Toyota, was a flash of something green darting past, and that might have been anybody’s car and not necessarily the shooter’s. If you were driving along the street and someone started shooting, your instinct would almost certainly be to get out of Dodge City fast. Or it might have been a kid on oversized green roller skates whipping past, for all he had seen from his vantage point under his car.

  Then, silence. After a while, he did raise his head cautiously, to look through the car’s windows and, when nobody shot at him through the glass, he half stood to look across the hood. And finally he stood up altogether. No shots. No one waiting with a gun. No one across the street, period.

  120 Victor J. Banis

  Maybe he’d imagined it altogether. Maybe nobody actually had shot at him. He turned to look at the utility pole. Here, they were made of something hard and gray-mottled and concrete like, he wasn’t sure exactly what it was called. And, no, it hadn’t been his imagination, there was the little ding in its surface where he thought a bullet had struck and ricocheted.

  What would Tom do? Look for the bullet, probably; but that he felt disinclined to do. Logic told him that the shooter, supposing there really had been one, was gone, but a much more persuasive part of him told him he’d feel much better getting out of the neighborhood.

  He got quickly into his car and started it up, all the time expecting to hear that explosive bang again.

  He drove away in a hurry.

  Why would anyone want to shoot him?

  § § § § §

  His first impulse was to rush to Tom, but he had questions now about Zack Pendleton, and he really wanted answers to them. There was nothing Tom could do immediately about the shooting, if that’s what it had been, and it would be lovely if he could wrap things up and hand the solved case to Tom. That, certainly, would put a pin in Bryce’s ego. Anyway, the shooter was gone. He couldn’t see him circling the block for another try.

  At least there was no mystery about where to find Zack.

  Stanley knew Zack was almost invariably to be found keeping a barstool warm at The Edge in the Castro. Which was exactly where Stanley found him. Nor did Zack seem particularly chagrined to be caught in a lie about his whereabouts on the morning his father had died.

  “Aunt Dora’s right, of course,” Zack said, tossing back the dregs of what looked like a Harvey Wallbanger and signaling the bartender for another. “But you can see how it looked. I mean, everyone knew Daddy and I were on the outs. All that crap about the will. Who else would they suspect, if not me?”

  DeaDly Silence 121

  “Just for the record, if you weren’t in the nurses’ lounge, as you told Inspector Bryce, where were you?”

  “Nowhere. I mean, nowhere that I can verify. I came down to the lounge, that part of it was true enough, but I didn’t feel like coffee and I was too restless just to sit, so I went outside and walked around in the gardens. They’re really fabulous, you know.

  I must find out who does their landscaping.”