The Face

cholesterol.
        Instead of spooning herself into heart failure, she appeared to grow healthier. She acquired a glow in the face and a brightness in the eyes that she’d never had before, not even in her youth.
        Gallons, barrels, troughs of Chocolate Mint Madness, Peanut-Butter-and-Chocolate Fantasy, Maple Walnut Delight, and a double dozen other flavors seemed to turn back her biological clock as the waters of a thousand fountains had failed to turn back that of Ponce de Leon.
        Corky had begun to think that in the case of his mother’s unique metabolism, the key to immortality might be butterfat. So he killed her.
        If she had been willing to share some of her money while still alive, he would have allowed her to live. He wasn’t greedy.
        She had not been a believer in generosity or even in parental responsibility, however, and she cared not at all about his comfort or his needs. He’d been concerned that eventually she would change her will and stiff him forever, sheerly for the pleasure of doing so.
        In her working years, his mother had been a university professor of economics, specializing in Marxist economic models and the vicious departmental politics of academia.
        [83] She had believed in nothing more than the righteousness of envy and the power of hatred. When both beliefs proved hollow, she had not abandoned either, but had supplemented them with ice cream.
        Corky didn’t hate his mother. He didn’t hate anyone.
        He didn’t envy anyone, either.
        Having seen those gods fail his mother, he had rejected both. He did not wish to grow old with no comfort but his favorite premium brand of coconut fudge.
        Four years ago, paying her a secret visit with the intention of quickly and mercifully smothering her in her sleep, he had instead beaten her to death with a fireplace poker, as if he were acting out a story begun by Anne Tyler in an ironic mood and roughly finished by a furious Norman Mailer.
        Though unplanned, the exercise with the poker proved cathartic. Not that he’d taken pleasure in the violence. He had not.
        The decision to murder her had really been as unemotional as any decision to purchase the stock of a blue-chip corporation, and the killing itself had been conducted with the same cool efficiency with which he would have executed any stock-market investment.
        Being an economist, his mother surely had understood.
        His alibi had been unassailable. He inherited her estate. Life went on. His life, anyway.
        Now, as he finished the candy bar, he felt sugar-soothed and chocolate-coddled.
        He still wanted to kill Reynerd, but the unwise urgency of the compulsion had passed. He would take time to plan the hit.
        When he acted, he would follow his scheme faithfully. This time, pillow would not become poker.
        Noticing that the yellow slicker had shed a lot of water on the seat, he sighed but did nothing. Corky was too committed an anarchist to care about the upholstery.
        Besides, he had Reynerd to brood about. A perpetual adolescent [84] inside a dour exterior, Rolf had been unable to resist the temptation to deliver the sixth box in person. Looking for a thrill.
        The fool had thought that perimeter security cameras did not exist solely because he himself could not spot them.
         Are there no other planets in the solar system, Corky had asked him, just because you can’t locate them in the sky?
        When Ethan Truman, Manheim’s security chief, came calling, Reynerd had been stunned. By his admission, he behaved suspiciously.
        As Corky wadded up the candy wrapper and stuffed it into the trash bag, he wished that he could dispose of Reynerd as easily.
        Suddenly rain fell more heavily than at any previous moment of the storm. The deluge knocked stubborn acorns from the oak under which he had parked, and cast them across the BMW. They rattled off the paint work and surely marred it, snapped off the windshield but did not crack it.
        He didn’t have to sit here, in a danger of acorns, plotting Reynerd’s demise, until a rotting thousand-pound limb broke free, fell on the car, and crushed him for his trouble. He could get on with his day and mentally draw up blueprints for the murder while he attended to other business.
        Corky drove a few miles to a popular upscale shopping mall and parked in the underground