From the Corner of His Eye

Maria Elena Gonzalez, where no one lived with fear like her brothers Edom and Jacob, where everyone spoke a single language and had all the blueberry pies they needed.
        She embraced the darkness.

Chapter 13
        
        AFTER DR. PARKHURST departed, a silence lay on the hospital room, heavier and colder than the ice bags that were draped across Junior's midsection.
        After a while, he dared to crack his eyelids. Pressing against his eyes was a blackness as smooth and as unrelenting as any known by a blind man. Not even a ghost of light haunted the night beyond the window, and the slats of the venetian blind were as hidden from view as the meatless ribs under Death's voluminous black robe.
        From the comer armchair, as if he could see so well in the dark that he knew Junior's eyes were open, Detective Thomas Vanadium said, "Did you hear my entire conversation with Dr. Parkhurst?"
        Junior's heart knocked so hard and fast that he wouldn't have been surprised if Vanadium, at the far end of the room, had begun to tap his foot in time with it.
        Although Junior had not answered, Vanadium said, "Yes, I thought you heard it."
        A trickster, this detective. Full of taunts and feints and sly stratagems. PsychologIcal-warfare artist.
        Perhaps a lot of suspects were rattled and ultimately unnerved by this behavior. Junior wouldn't be easily trapped. He was smart.
        Applying his intelligence now, he employed simple meditation techniques to calm himself and to slow his heartbeat. The cop was trying to rattle him into making a mistake, but calm men did not incriminate themselves.
        "What was it like, Enoch? Did you look into her eyes when you pushed her?" Vanadium's uninflected monologue was like the voice of a conscience that preferred to torture by droning rather than by nagging. "Or doesn't a woman-killing coward like you have the guts for that? "
        Pan-faced, double-chinned, half-bald, puke-collecting asshole, Junior thought.
        No. Wrong attitude. Be calm. Be indifferent to insult.
        "Did you wait until her back was turned, too gutless even to meet her eyes?"
        This was pathetic. Only thickheaded fools, unschooled and unworldly, would be shaken into confession by ham-handed tactics like these.
        Junior was educated. He wasn't merely a masseur with a fancy title; he had earned a hill bachelor of science degree with a major in rehabilitation therapy. When he watched television, which he never did to excess, he rarely settled for frivolous game shows or sitcoms like Gomer Pyle or The Beverly Hillbillies, or even I Dream of Jeannie, but committed himself to serious dramas that required intellectual involvement-Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and The Fugitive. He preferred Scrabble to all other board games, because it expanded one's vocabulary. As a member in good standing of the Book-of-the-Month Club, he'd already acquired nearly thirty volumes of the finest in contemporary literature, and thus far he'd read or skim-read more than six of them. He would have read all of them if he had not been a busy man with such varied interests; his cultural aspirations were greater than the time he was able to devote to them.
        Vanadium said, "Do you know who I am, Enoch?"
        Thomas Big Butt Vanadium.
        "Do you know what I am?"
        Pimple on the ass of humanity.
        "No," said Vanadium, "you only think you know who I am and what I am, but you don't know anything. That's all right. You'll learn."
        This guy was spooky. Junior was beginning to think that the detective's unorthodox behavior wasn't a carefully crafted strategy, as it had first seemed, but that Vanadium was a little wacky.
        Whether the cop was unhinged or not, Junior had nothing to gain by talking to him, especially in this disorienting darkness. He was exhausted, achy, with a sore throat, and he couldn't trust himself to be as self-controlled as he would need to be in any interrogation conducted by this brush-cut, thick-necked toad.
        He stopped straining to see through the black room to the corner armchair. He closed his eyes and tried to lull himself to sleep by summoning into his mind's eye a lovely but calculatedly monotonous scene of gentle waves breaking on a moonlit shore.
        This was a relaxation technique that had worked often before. He had teamed it from a brilliant book, How to Have a Healthier Life through