As savvy as Dad was in the ways of Hollywood, as talented as he was at screwing associates and browbeating even the most vicious and psychotic studio bosses, he was also a widower of fifteen years and the champion crier of his time, as vulnerable in some ways as he was imperviously armored in others. Viveca would have married him, found a way to drive him to an early death, eaten his liver with chopped onions the night before the funeral, and then cast his son out of the mansion with nothing but a used Mercedes and a token monthly stipend.
In the interest of justice, therefore, the doctor was prepared to eliminate Viveca on the same night that he killed his father. He prepared a second syringe of the ultrashort-acting thiobarbital and paraldehyde, intending to injectitinto something she might eat or directly into the starlet herself.
When the great director lay dead in the library, felled by the poisoned petits fours, but before surgery had been performed on his lacrimal apparatus, the doctor had gone in search of Viveca and had found her in his father’s bed. A bobinga-wood crack pipe and other drug paraphernalia littered the nightstand, and a book of poetry was on the rumpled sheets beside her. The starlet was snoring like a bear that had gorged on late-season berries half fermented on the vine, spit bubbles swelling and popping on her lips.
She was as naked as nature had made her, and because nature had obviously been in a lascivious mood at the time, the young doctor got all sorts of hot ideas. A lot of money was at stake here, however, and money was power, and power was better than sex.
Earlier in the day, during a private moment, he and Viveca had gotten into an ugly little argument that ended when she coyly noted that she had never seen him well up with emotion the way his father did so routinely. “We’re alike, you and me,” she said. “Your father got his share of tears
The memory of this threat gave the doctor an idea better than sex.
He went to the far end of the three-acre estate, to the lavishly equipped tool room and woodworking shop housed in the building that also contained, upstairs, the apartments of the couple that managed the estate, Mr. and Mrs. Haufbrock, and the handymangroundskeeper, Earl Ventnor. The Haufbrocks were away on a one-week vacation, and Earl was no doubt passed out after his nightly patriotic effort to ensure that the American brewing industry would not be driven into bankruptcy by competition from foreign beers.
Without the need to skulk, therefore, the doctor selected a Black & Decker power drill from the collection of tools. He had the presence of mind also to take a twenty-foot, orange extension cord.
In his father’s bedroom once more, he plugged the extension cord into a wall outlet, plugged the drill into the extension cord, and thus equipped, climbed onto the bed with Viveca, straddling her but remaining on his knees. She was so doped that she snored through all his preparations, and he had to shout her name repeatedly to wake her. When she finally came around, blinking stupidly, she smiled up at him, as if she believed he was someone other than who he was, as if she thought the power drill was an elaborate new Swedish vibrator.
Thanks to the superb instruction provided by the Harvard Medical School, the doctor was able to position the half-inch steel bit with pinpoint accuracy. To the confused and smiling Viveca, he said, “If you don’t have a heart, something else must be in there, and the best way to identify it is take a core sample.”
The shriek of the powerful little Black & Decker motor brought her out of her drug stupor. By then, however, the drilling operation was under way and in fact nearly completed.
After taking time just to appreciate the loveliness of Viveca being dead, the doctor noticed the book of poetry that lay open on the sheets. A whorl of blood soiled both exposed pages, but in a pristine circle of white paper in the middle of the crimson stain were three lines of verse.
He did not know then that the poem was a haiku, that it had been written by Okyo in 1890, that it was about the poet’s own impending death, and that, like many haiku, it didn’t translate into English with the ideal five-seven-five syllable pattern in which it was composed in the original Japanese.
