CHAPTER 22

I WAS TIRED OF THE HOUSE ON CRANBERRY STREET. I drove up there in time to see the sunset reflected brilliantly across the bay windows, but the sunset didn't do the trick. I knew too much about the house and the people in it to like it very much. Yet for all of that I still didn't know enough. I was back banging on the door.

Pansy Greenleaf answered it. She stood there for a moment, wide-eyed and tentative, and it was like we'd somehow started over with each other. As if we forgot that the last time I was here she'd risen out of a drug-induced torpor to swear an end to my life if I ever came back. The moment went on long enough that I began to wonder if she did remember that last encounter. Then the soft flesh of her cheeks tightened, and her eyes narrowed, and her fist clenched on the edge of the door.

"Hello, Patricia."

She didn't say anything.

"You look better," I said. "That's nice to see. We have to talk."

"I'm busy."

"Somebody here?" I stood on tiptoe to look past her into the house. "Celeste? I need to talk to Celeste too."

"No. No one's here."

"I see. You're busy like yesterday, you mean. That's bad stuff, Pansy. I had somebody look at that stuff under a microscope. It eats you alive."

"That's my business."

"That's Danny Phoneblum's business, princess. You're just the customer." I went into the house, and had to shoulder her aside to do it.

When I turned the corner into the living room, I was greeted by the sight of three babyheads lined up in a neat row on the couch. They didn't go with the house, to put it simply. Their existence seemed absurdly literal, like the punch line of a joke someone misunderstood and took seriously. Sasha the kitten—who was nowhere to be seen—belonged in this house more than the babyheads ever would. She was more human.

Barry sat at one end, a little apart from the other two, his loud yellow wig still jutting at an idiotically jaunty angle on his head. The babyhead in the toga who'd taken me upstairs in the hotel sat at the other end, twisting his sheet into a dirty gray rope around his fingers. Between them sat another one I didn't recognize, wearing a little red Spiderman outfit, dark glasses, and a baseball cap on his oversized bald head.

"Barry," I said. "Long time no see."

"Mr. Asshole," said Barry. "Have a seat."

Pansy came in behind me. I turned and smiled at her, and caught an eyeful of daggers.

"My apologies," I said. "You've got visitors. Go ahead with what you were saying. I'll be quiet as a mouse."

Pansy didn't say anything. Barry wrinkled his forehead and said: "Quiet as a mouth." The other babyheads snickered.

Pansy retreated behind an empty chair. "A man named Kornfeld was here looking for you," she said. "He told me I should call him if you bothered me again."

"Office boy," I said. "No big deal. He owes me some karma, probably wants to pay up."

"You're in trouble," she said. "I don't have to hate your guts. I get to feel sorry for you."

"Thanks, Pansy. Think of me next time you roll off the bed onto your needle."

"Why don't you get lost, big man," said Barry. "You're butting in."

"Butting in is my life," I said, turning to face the babyheads. "Indulge me."

The babyhead with the dark glasses had taken them off and clipped them onto his collar. He and the one in the sheet stared up at me together, hollow-eyed and vaguely bemused despite the eddies of emotional turbulence stirring the air in the room. The two faces created a kind of stereophonic effect, the woofer and tweeter of eeriness.

I turned back to Pansy. "I'm looking for Celeste," I said. "Have you seen her?"

"You're too late," she said. "She was here this morning, but she left."

"Did she say anything about where she was going?"

"She was upset. She said you refused to help her. She wanted to call Inquisitor Morgenlander and tell him Orton was innocent."

"What did you say?"

Pansy's hand gripped the back of the chair, and her eyes sought the floor. Then she looked up at me resentfully. "I said it was stupid. That it was obvious Orton had done it." Her cheeks turned red, but she didn't look away.

"That was brave." I sort of meant it.

"Go to hell," she said, and turned and walked out of the room. I listened and could just make out her footfalls on the carpeted stairs. Then the squeak of a bedspring, upstairs.

Barry looked smug, as though he'd choreographed Pansy's actions and was pleased to see them performed so precisely. Woofer and Tweeter just rolled their eyes like spectators at a tennis match.

"Why'd you come back?" I asked.

"I haven't been here in weeks," said Barry. "From what you said, it sounded like it was getting interesting."

"What do you think?"

"I was right. It is interesting."

"Do you love your mother, Barry?"

"I don't love anything." He spoke the word as if he knew what it meant and I didn't.

"Then what I'm about to tell you won't matter."

"Nothing you've said has yet."

I took a deep breath. It mattered to me. "Celeste Stanhunt's your mother, not Pansy Greenleaf. It took a while, but it all came clear. Pansy works for Danny Phoneblum, but no one will say what she does. She's a nanny, Barry. Or she was until you left the nest."

Barry just smiled. "You can't imagine how little this interests me."

"I don't believe you."

"My motives are beyond your comprehension."

"I guess." I went behind the kitchen counter, found a drinking glass on the sideboard, and filled it with water at the tap.

"You never answered my question," said Barry.

"What's that?"

"How it felt to be what you are."

"The question wasn't quite that simple, when you asked it," I said. "You used some words I didn't understand."

"You're an asshole," said Barry. "The worst kind. You think you represent Truth and Justice, or something."

I took a big drink of water before I answered. I was getting a little steamed, even if he was just three years old. "Truth and Justice," I said. "I wonder if you really know what the hell it is you're talking about, or whether words just keep pouring out because of the thing they did to your brain. Truth and Justice. Nice, easy words."

I caught myself. The speech was wasted on babyheads—maybe wasted on anybody.

Then I made the mistake of deciding to give them something to think about. "What if I told you I thought Truth and Justice were two completely different things?"

Woofer liked that a lot. He turned to Tweeter and said: "What if I told you I thought Truth and Justice were four different things?"

Tweeter chimed in right on cue. "What if I told you Love and Money were six different things?"

"Some other time," I said. "I'm not in the mood." I put the glass of water back on the counter and went to the door.

"What if I told you I thought Time and Mood were twelve different things?" said Barry behind me.