Eyes of Prey

half-clear capsules. Beauty was the white tabs of methamphetamine hydrochloride, the shiny jet-black caps of amphetamine, and the green-and-black bumblebees of phendimetrazine tartrate. All legal.
    Beauty was especially the illegals, the anonymous white tabs of MDMA, called ecstasy, and the perforated squares of blotter, printed with the signs of the Zodiac, each with its drop of sweet acid, and the cocaine.
    Beauty was anabolic steroids for the body and synthetic human growth hormone to fight the years . . . .
     
    Everyday Bekker was down and dark.
    Bekker was blood-red capsules of codeine, the Dilaudid.The minor benzodiazepines smoothed his anxieties, the Xanax and Librium and Clonopin, Tranxene and Valium, Dalmane and Paxipam, Ativan and Serax. The molindone, for a troubled mind. All legal.
    And the illegals.
    The white tabs of methaqualone, coming in from Europe.
    Most of all, the phencyclidine, the PCP.
    The power.
     
    Bekker had once carried an elegant gold pillbox for his medicines, but eventually it no longer sufficed. At a Minneapolis antique store he bought a brass Art Deco cigarette case, which he lined with velvet. It would hold upward of a hundred tablets. Food for them both, Beauty and Bekker . . .
    Beauty stared into the cigarette case and relived the morning. As Bekker, he’d gone to the funeral home and demanded to see his wife.
     
    “Mr. Bekker, I really think, the condition . . .” The undertaker was nervous, his face flickering from phony warmth to genuine concern, a light patina of sweat on his forehead. Mrs. Bekker was not one of their better products. He didn’t want her husband sick on the carpet.
    “God damn it, I want to see her,” Bekker snapped.
    “Sir, I have to warn you . . .” The undertaker’s hands were fluttering.
    Bekker fixed him with a cold stare, a ferret’s stare: “I am a pathologist. I know what I will see.”
    “Well. I suppose . . .” The undertaker’s lips made an O of distaste.
     
    She was lying on a frilly orange satin pad, inside the bronze coffin. She was smiling, just slightly, with a rosy blush on her cheeks. The top half of her face, from the bridge of the noseup, looked like an airbrushed photograph. All wax, all moldings and makeup and paint, and none of it quite right. The eyes were definitely gone. They’d put her together the best they could, but considering the way she’d died, there wasn’t much they could do . . . .
    “My God,” Bekker said, reaching out to the coffin. A wave of exultation rose through his body. He was rid of her.
    He’d hated her for so long, watching her with her furniture and her rugs, her old paintings in the heavy carved frames, the inkwells and cruets and compotes and Quimper pots, the lopsided bottles dug from long-gone outhouses. She’d touch it, stroke it, polish it, move it, sell it. Caress it with her little piggy eyes . . . Talk about it, endlessly, with her limp-wristed antiquarian friends, all of them perched on rickety chairs with teacups, rattling on endlessly, Mahogany with reeded legs, gilt tooled leather, but you almost couldn’t tell under the horrible polish she’d absolutely poured on the piece, well, she obviously didn’t know what she had, or didn’t care. I was there to look at a Georgian tea table that she’d described as gorgeous, but it turned out to be really very tatty, if I do say so . . . .
    And now she was dead.
    He frowned. Hard to believe that she had had a lover. One of those soft, heavy pale men who talked of teapots and wing chairs . . . unbelievable. What did they do in bed? Talk?
    “Sir, I really think . . .” The undertaker’s hand on his arm, steadying him, not understanding.
    “I’m okay,” Bekker said, accepting the comforting arm with a delicious sense of deception. He stood there for another minute, the undertaker behind him, ignored. This was not something he’d want to forget . . . .
     
    Michael Bekker was beautiful. His head was large, his blond hair thick and carefully cut, feathering back over small, perfect ears. His forehead was broad and unlined, his eyebrows light, near-white commas over his startlingly bluedeep-set eyes. The only wrinkles on his face were barely noticeable crow’s-feet: they enhanced his beauty, rather than detracted from it, adding an ineffable touch of masculinity.
    Below his eyes, his nose was a narrow wedge, his nostrils small, almost dainty. His chin was square, with a cleft, his complexion