The phone went click.

*41*

Every maggot lives down town. a"Journal, October 15, 1840 The offices of Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket were housed in a pink marble building on Federal Street. The luxurious lobby, too, was lined with marble. It was obvious to Homer that Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket were doing well. Other people's personal injuries were their personal happy times, the sordid miseries of litigious customers their chuckles and merriment. Some poor wretch fell off a scaffolding and broke his back, and Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket rubbed their hands with glee.

Homer took the elevator to the seventh floor, chastising himself for his disdain. Somebody had to help people out when ghastly things happened to them, and why not Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket?

POUCH, HEAVISIDE AND SPROCKET.

ATTORNEYS AT LAW.

said the bra.s.s plate on the door. Homer walked in and flinched. What was the matter with him? He had become absurdly sensitive to high-toned sw.a.n.k. He blamed it on the year he had spent in Florence, surrounded on every side by perfection of proportion and effortless grace. He would have to get over it, if he was going to go on consorting with the likes of Jefferson Grandison and Archie Pouch.

Homer tried to avoid looking at the extravagant flossiness of the waiting room. He concentrated instead on the receptionist. She was very different from Abigail Saltonstall.

Something about her plucked eyebrows and the abandon with which she was chewing gum made her look like a film star of the 1930s.

"You can't see Mr. Pouch without an appointment," she said, her jaw going around and around. Her gum was pink. Homer hoped she would blow a bubble.

"Oh, I think Mr. Pouch will see me," said Homer. "My name is Kelly, Homer Kelly. I'm Mr. Jefferson Grandison's attorney." It was only half a lie. Somewhere in Homer's attic lay a mildewed diploma from Suffolk University Law School.

The girl was impressed. Her jaw stopped rotating. She hoisted herself from her chair, pushed open a door, and disappeared.

Homer occupied himself while she was gone by picking up an old Celebrity magazine from an immense gla.s.s coffee table. The magazine fell open at a picture of a goodlooking young man stepping into a limousine in New Delhi under the heading THE TEN MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELORS IN THE WORLD. Homer gasped. It was Ananda Singh.

The receptionist came back. "Okey-doke," she said, like a true thirties movie star, "you can go right in."

Archie Pouch too seemed a throwback to the silver screen of days gone by, as he came striding forward to shake hands with Homer. His suit was sharp, his tie was white, his shirt was black. "Mr. Kelly, pleased to meet you. Now maybe we can get this whole can of worms straightened out, the whole ball of wax, right?"

"Well, of course Mr. Grandison certainly wishes to do the right thing." Homer was surprised to find himself sounding stuffy and dignified, as though he were genuinely concerned with the best interests of Grandison Enterprises.

"Okay, so tell me, when does old Jeff plan to give the heave-ho to Lot Seventeen? That's what this b.u.mmer's all about, right? Let's get something straight right from the start. Grandison thinks he's an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, right? Well, so what? So's my client. Me, I'm a thousand-pound gorilla." Archie Pouch thumped his chest with both fists like King Kong. "My client paid your client spot cash to deep-six Lot Seventeen. Grandison's got to give it the b.u.m's rush, understand? My client's fed up with the way he just sits there on his b.u.t.t."

Aha, thought Homer gratefully, so Lot Seventeen wasn't something Grandison had bought, it was something he had been paid to take away. So much for Mary's notion that it was rugs and works of art! What kind of thing would someone be paid to remove? It would have to be something n.o.body wanted. Something toxic, putrid, poisonous, radioactive, evil-smelling. Homer gazed piously at the ceiling and phrased a careful response. "The toxic characteristics of Lot Seventeen are disputed in scientific circles."

"Toxic!" Archie Pouch stared at Homer in disbelief. "n.o.body's pretending Lot Seventeen is toxic." He guffawed. "It's just in our f.u.c.king way."

"May I ask," ventured Homer, groping in the dark, "how much of your client's s.p.a.ce it now occupies?"

"Jesus, Grandison knows how much s.p.a.ce it occupies. Forty acres, that's how much. It's the biggest specialized dump in New England. The stuffs gotta go." Pouch leaned forward and put his nose close to Homer's. His breath smelled of mint wafers and gin. "Get that s.h.i.t out of there."

"Forty acres? Forty acres of ... of...?" Homer waited encouragingly for Pouch to elucidate the nature of Lot Seventeen.

But Pouch was suddenly on his guard. "What the h.e.l.l, Kelly? You mean you don't know?" He leaned still farther forward, and Homer had to arch his back to keep the Pouch nose away from his chin. It was easy to picture the man intimidating witnesses in a courtroom.

Adopting a hoity-toity manner, Homer tried to bluff his way out. "I'm afraid Mr. Grandison has treated this matter as a strictly legal problem. He has not divulged to me what it is that he has contracted to remove. I'm afraid I don'ta""

"Oh, Christ." Pouch put his hand on Homer's chest and shoved him toward the door. "What are you, some kind of media? Sprocket," he shouted, "hey, Sprocket, come in here."

Homer looked over Pouch's shoulder uneasily, expecting a thug in a fedora hat and double-breasted suit. Sprocket turned out to be a healthy-looking kid in baby blue suspenders, with overhanging brows like some small-brained early hominid, Australopithecus, or something like that. But small-brained or not, Sprocket had obviously pa.s.sed the Ma.s.sachusetts bar, and now he took Homer's arm in a mighty grip and dragged him out of Pouch's office.

"Never mind, Sprocket," said Homer, shaking himself free, speaking through his teeth, trying to retrieve some shred of dignity. "I shall leave of my own free will."

At home he found Mary still lost in the internecine affairs of the cathedral city of Barchester. Looking up from her book, she admitted to Homer her failure at extracting information on Grandison's enterprises by telephone. "It was zilch all the way, I'm afraid. I can tell you all you want to know about the state of the Anglican church in nineteenth-century England, but as for Mr. Grandison's undertakings, I haven't got a clue. They're all wrapped in veils of awful music and answering machines and sullen switchboard operators who don't know anything, and the people who do know something are in conference and can't be disturbed until Tuesday."

"It's Grandison's celestial conglomerate," said Homer darkly. "You can't expect to reach G.o.d on the telephone, nor anybody sitting at his right or left hand. When you get down on your knees to say a prayer, the angel Gabriel puts you on hold." Then he confessed his own humiliating failure in the pink marble sanctuary of Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket. "I did find out one thing, however," he said, pouring himself a drink. "Lot Seventeen isn't Oriental rugs and Rembrandts, it's something putrid Grandison has agreed to remove."

"Well, good, that's some kind of progress." Mary ran into the kitchen to take a pot off the stove, then poked her head out again. "Listen, I've been thinking. What about Jerry Neville? Remember Jerry? Jerry knows everything."

Homer's gloom vanished. "Jerry Neville, of course. How could I have forgotten Jerry?"

Jerry Neville was a criminal lawyer who had given up practice in the courts to pursue a personal investigation of the inner workings of the commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts at the end of the twentieth century. His book, if he ever had the audacity to publish it, would scandalize the nation. Jerry had been working on it for years.

When Homer reached him on the phone, Jerry was pleased with the nature of the problem. "Sure, sure, I know exactly how to go about it. I've got ten thousand file cards on the interlocking interests of big operators in this state. Read me the list."

Homer read the names on the piece of paper he had stolen from Abigail Saltonstall, and Jerry took them down, chuckling now and then.

"What are you snickering about?" said Homer. "I mean, that was what I'd call a knowing snicker, if ever I heard one."

"I'll tell you later," promised Jerry.

When he called back next day he was laughing. "Oh, Homer, thank you. I never enjoyed myself so much in my life. I should have guessed it. Jefferson Grandison has taken up the n.o.ble cause of toxic waste disposal. It's a terrible problem in this state. No kidding, it really is. n.o.body wants it in their backyard, especially the kind that emits low-level radiation. But the stuff has to be got rid of somehow, so Grandison obliges. For the right fee he'll take any kind of crud and dispose of it for you, no questions asked. He's the hazardous-waste king of New England, the emperor of toxic trash. G.o.d knows what he does with it. That Lot Seventeen of yours must be something highly undesirable."

"You mean Ah Wilderness and Breathe Free and Save the World and so on, they're all just disgusting bilge of one kind or another, putrid petroleum gushing out of dirty pipes, raw-sewage, that sort of thing?"

"Worse stuff, probably. Well, that's our century for you, a hundred years of swill. Translate all those pretty words of his into their proper names, and you get Foul Water instead of Seash.o.r.es Unlimited, and Contaminated Air instead of Breathe Free. But give the man credit. The putrid stuff is there, and somebody has to dispose of it. The only question is how. Do you trust him to get rid of it safely? I don't."

"But, listen, Jerry, it's not toxic. That's all I could get out of Archie Pouch. Lot Seventeen isn't toxic, it's just in the way."

"In the way?" Jerry was silent for a minute. "That's strange. Hey, what's that noise?"

Homer laughed. "Can you hear it? Well, I'll tell you what it is. It's Birdsong Incorporated, it's Pride of the Earth, it's Dreams of the Maine Coast. It's Canada geese, that's what it is. They're back already. They're flying over the house making a h.e.l.l of a racket."

"Oh, I see. Well, so long."

Homer hung up and went out on the porch to watch the long straggling line of Canadas flap low over the river. They were calling to each other hoa.r.s.ely, gliding with widespread hovering wings, coming to rest on the water and rocking up and down.

*42*

I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy

at the death of each of our friends... a"Journal, February 3, 1859

"Homer? This is Julian Snow." Julian's voice was quiet but intense.

"Just a sec." Homer looked at his watch. It was five-fifteen in the morning. Unsnarling the telephone wire, he put his legs over the side of the bed. "Something else has happened, hasn't it?"

"It's Porter McAdoo. He was changing a tire, and the jack collapsed, and the car came down on him. I've called the police ambulance, but it's too late."

"I'll be right over."

When Homer drove into Pond View, people were standing around in a gloomy half circlea"Honey Mooney in a turquoise wrapper, Pete Harris in an enormous bathrobe, Stuart LaDue in a nightshirt, his old man's bow legs bare, Eugene Beaver with a winter coat b.u.t.toned over his nakedness, Julian Snow fully dressed in shirt and jeans.

Who was missing? Homer ran over the list in his mind. Only Charlotte Harris. He got out of his car and stood with the others, watching a couple of paramedics from Emerson Hospital slam the ambulance doors on Porter McAdoo.

"Who found him?" said Homer.

The residents of Pond View shuffled uneasily and looked at each other. "It was Charlotte Harris," said Stu LaDue. "She said he was already dead." Stu rolled his eyes to imply that Charlotte's word was not to be trusted.

They stood back to let the ambulance turn around and drive away. Julian looked at Stu LaDue angrily. "The ambulance guys, they said he'd been dead for a while. It didn't just happen this morning."

Stu shrugged, Pete Harris shook his head sorrowfully, Honey Mooney wiped her eyes, and Eugene Beaver huddled down in his raincoat. Then they all drifted away. The day threatened to be sticky and hot.

Homer and Julian inspected Porter's shiny Ford Taurus. There was nothing much to look at. It had been hoisted high on the jack again so that Porter's body could be removed.

"b.u.mper jack, I see," said Homer.

"Why didn't he sh.o.r.e up the wheels with those big stones?" said Julian. "See those white rocks, there in his flower bed: Porter was a careful kind of guy. I don't understand it."

"Why didn't anybody discover him sooner? It must have happened last night."

"Real late, probably. Porter was a night owl. He used to wash his car at midnight. Sometimes he mowed his lawn by the light of the moon."

Julian looked at Homer reproachfully, and Homer felt a stab of guilt. Somehow, some way, he should have been on hand when Porter McAdoo was jacking up his car.

"Mr. Kelly, Mr. Kelly!" Homer turned to see Honey Mooney running toward them, waving her arms. Her turquoise wrapper flapped, her slippers flip-flopped on the pavement. She was puffing and out of breath. "My curtains, somebody set fire to my curtains!"

"Jesus," said Julian. They hurried after Honey and followed her into her big mobile home, one of the largest in the park.

"Somebody must have set fire to them while I was out just now." Honey gestured at the pair of dripping charred curtains hanging on either side of her bay window. She had drenched the smoldering ruffles with a kettle of water. "I didn't lock my door. I just ran out. Look at my entertainment center! It's all wet. I'll bet my TV won't work anymore." Leaning down, she turned on the switch. At once the set flickered into life, and there on the screen were Vanessa and Angelica pulling each other's hair. "Well, at least the picture's still nice and sharp."

Julian recognized the curtains. They were the ones he had given to Honey after Alice's death. "It's strange," he said. "Both sides are burned the same amount."

"That's right," said Homer. "You'd think a fire would catch one side and burn it all the way to the top before the other side started. It looks as if somebody touched a match to one side and then the other." He looked at Honey. "You didn't leave a cigarette burning in an ashtray under the curtains?"

Honey looked offended. "I don't smoke."

"But who could have done it? All of you were there together beside the ambulance. All of you excepta"" Homer glanced at Julian, who looked away.

"All of us except Charlotte Harris," said Honey in triumph.

"Why don't I go talk to Charlotte?" mumbled Homer, excusing himself. Outside on Honey's lawn he shook Julian's hand and said good-bye. He couldn't think of anything else to say, except "Watch out for yourself, be careful, you're all in danger," but Julian knew that perfectly well.

Homer knocked on Charlotte's door. She opened it at once and seemed glad to see him, but she looked embarra.s.sed as she invited him to come in and sit down. Homer guessed that her style was cramped by the presence of her husband, who sat impa.s.sively on the sofa like a toad.

"May I ask how you found Porter this morning, Mrs. Harris?"

"I went out very early to sprinkle the lawn, because there's been so little rain lately, and I saw him right away, pinned under his car." Charlotte's eyes filled with tears. "He was a fine man." She glanced at Pete, who lifted his shoulders and raised his eyebrows, as if to say "He was okay, I guess."

"Did you happen to go into Honey Mooney's while the others were all at the other end of the park just now?"

Charlotte looked at him blankly. "No, I was right here, looking out the window."

"Did you see anyone else go into Mrs. Mooney's?"

Charlotte shook her head.

"What's the matter?" said Pete. "Somebody steal something?"

"No," said Homer gravely. "Somebody set fire to her curtains."

"Fire!" said Charlotte. "Not another fire?"