From the Corner of His Eye

thought he had left his best stuff at Reverend Harrison White's parsonage.
        He loved Naomi, of course, and never could deny her. Although he had been especially sweet to her that night, if he had known that they would have less than a year together before fate tore her from him, he might have been even sweeter.
        As Junior stood at Seraphim's grave, his breath smoked from him in the still night air, as though he were a dragon.
        He wondered if the girl had talked.
        Perhaps, reluctant to admit to herself that she had yearned for him to do everything that he'd done, she had slowly been inflamed by guilt, until she convinced herself that she had, indeed, been raped. Psychotic little bitch.
        Did this explain why Thomas Vanadium suspected Junior when no one else did?
        If the detective believed that Seraphim had been raped, his natural desire to exact vengeance for his friend's daughter might motivate him to commit the relentless harassment that Junior had endured now for four days.
        On second thought-no. If Seraphim had told anyone she'd been raped, the police would have been at Junior's doorstep in minutes, with a warrant for his arrest. No matter that they would have no proof. In this age of high sympathy for the previously oppressed, the word of a teenage Negro girl would have greater weight than Junior's clean record, fine reputation, and heartfelt denials.
        Vanadium was surely unaware of any connection between Junior and Seraphim White. And now the girl could never talk.
        Junior remembered the very words the detective had used: They say she died in a traffic accident.
        They say…
        As usual, Vanadium had spoken in a monotone, putting no special emphasis on those two words. Yet Junior sensed that the detective harbored doubts about the explanation of the girl's death.
        Maybe every accidental death was suspicious to Vanadium. His obsessive hounding of Junior might be his standard operating procedure.
        After too many years investigating homicides, after too much experience of human evil, perhaps he had grown both misanthropic and paranoid.
        Junior could almost feel sorry for this sad, stocky, haunted detective, deranged by years of difficult public service.
        The bright side was easy to see. If Vanadium's reputation among other cops and among prosecutors was that of a paranoid, a pathetic a after phantom perpetrators, his unsupported belief that Naomi murdered would be discounted. And if every death was suspicious to him, then he would quickly lose interest in Junior and move on to a new enthusiasm, harassing some other poor devil.
        Supposing that this new enthusiasm was an attempt to uncover skullduggery in Seraphim's accident, then the girl would be doing Junior a service even after her demise. Whether or not the traffic accident was an accident, Junior hadn't had anything to do with it.
        Gradually he grew calm. His great frosty exhalations diminished to a diaphanous dribble that evaporated two inches from his lips.
        Reading the dates on the headstone, he saw that the minister's daughter had died on the seventh of January, the day after Naomi had fallen from the fire tower. If ever asked, Junior would have no trouble accounting for his whereabouts on that day.
        He switched off the flashlight and stood solemnly for a moment, paying his respects to Seraphim. She had been so sweet, so innocent, so supple, so exquisitely proportioned.
        Ropes of sadness bound his heart, but he didn't cry.
        If their relationship had not been limited to a single evening of passion, if they had not been of two worlds, if she had not been underage and therefore jailbait, they might have had an open romance, and then her death would have touched him more deeply.
        A ghostly crescent of pale light shimmered on the black granite.
        Junior looked up from the tombstone to the moon. It seemed like a wickedly sharp silver scimitar suspended by a filament more fragile than a human hair.
        Although it was just the moon, it unnerved him.
        Suddenly the night seemed… watchful.
        Without using his flashlight, depending only on the moon, he ascended through the cemetery to the service road.
        When he reached the Suburban and closed his right hand around the handle on the driver's door, he felt something peculiar against his palm. A small, cold object