Darkman (7 page)

She almost slapped herself. “Good grief, Louis, I am so sorry. You’ve got all the condolences I can offer.” She almost stood up. “I’ll just go out and come back in, start all over.”

He smiled. “Don’t feel so terrible. My father had been on death’s doorstep the last five or ten years. Bum ticker.” He poked a finger at his heart. “It was inevitable.”

She frowned. “I thought he got shot.”

“Indeed. At least it ended his suffering. The best the police can come up with yet is that a hunter or sport shooter let a bullet fly where it shouldn’t. It hit his hand and ricocheted into his chest. Happens occasionally. Last year a teenage girl was shot dead while driving on the freeway. The hunter was almost a mile away.” He tapped a finger behind his ear. “Killed her instantly.”

“I think I read about that. Please forgive my stupidity.”

He smiled. “Your intelligence is not a matter of debate. Now, what’s this about a Claude, ah, Bellery? Benson?”

“Bellasarious. The memo spells it out pretty clearly.” She lifted the lid of her briefcase and soon found, to her horror, that the memo was gone. She remembered the coffee and that she’d laid the paper aside to dry. She had a sudden, almost desperate desire to cry.

“Ah,” Louis said, and began to pace his spacious office. “Yes, I know the memo.”

“You mean . . . you’ve read it?”

“It?” He looked slightly ill. “Them, you mean. Hundreds, though not quite so well documented as the one in question.”

She frowned. “It seems like a record of some strange payments.”

“They were payoffs,” he said without hesitation. “Payoffs to the zoning commission. Bribes, to call a spade a spade.”

“Then you knew?”

“Of course.” He looked at her with an appraising eye. “Does that shock you?”

She sighed. “Actually, it does. But worst of all, I think, is that is disappoints me. But it’s not my place to pass judgment.”

He continued to pace, his fingers linked behind his back. “That’s true, it is not your place. However, as Strack Industries’ consulting attorney, I do value your opinion.”

“Does that mean you expect me to endorse the practice? Give my okay for bribes?”

“Of course not. You weren’t supposed to know about them. That memo was not supposed to circulate, and you can bet your ass my secretary will be pounding the pavement tomorrow looking for a new job.” He slammed a fist into his open palm. “God, I wished this had never happened!”

“But it did,” she said coolly.

“Right. It did. But I am asking you to have some understanding here. I’m not going to bore you with that old speech about how we all have to swim in the same pond. But you know as well as I do that not so much as one mini-mall ever went up in this city without some grease being applied to the greedy palms downtown.”

She deliberated. Did she know? If so, had it never struck her that someday she would be one of the greasers? She shook her head. “I believe in the old saw, the one that says honesty is the best—”

“Policy. Right. But you’re not naïve. You know it’s just part of the cost of doing business. Ordinarily people don’t have to face it, but I face it every day. And I don’t let it turn me into a cynic. That’s the chicken way out, and I’m tougher than that. I don’t let it distract me from my dream. Come here and look at this.”

She put her briefcase on the floor and followed. There was a large, thick beige curtain covering most of the south wall. He pressed a button and it slid open. A light popped on. On a huge table perhaps ten feet long was a scale architectural model, fantastically detailed down to the trees and shrubs and tiny cars in the parking lots. It looked like a wonderful toy for a very rich child.

“This is Project Riverfront Development. What you see here is what everyone will see within three years: that trashy, polluted mud flat turned into a jewel. Dust into diamonds. Poverty into wealth. Take a long look at this model, Julie. It is the final touch of a dream. Acres of riverfront reclaimed from decay, thousands of jobs created, a building block—a very
large
building block—laid for the future. Not such a bad dream, as dreams go. And if the price of making this dream come true is greasing a few palms, well . . . I don’t run away. I say, ‘so be it.’ So”—he held his hands out to her, wrists together, palms up—“gonna book me?”

She smiled in spite of herself. What a guy.

“The point is, Julie, that my father is well beyond the reach of the law, but that memo could embarrass Strack Industries.”

“I get the point, Louis,” she said. “But the fact remains that I’m in possession of evidence about the commission of a crime, and you can no more ask me to destroy it than I could ask you to destroy one of your new buildings.”

He passed his fingertips over his mouth, staring at the floor, debating. Then he brightened. “Let me suggest this. You excuse yourself for a few minutes, go to the ladies’ room or some such, leaving your briefcase here. What happens to the memorandum while it’s in my custody is my responsibility. Good?”

“Very good, and I wish it were that simple. First of all, I don’t even have the memo with me. Second, I need to discuss this with one of the partners at Pappas and Swain. Did . . . perhaps . . . Pappas know anything about this?”

He shook his head. “Not a chance. You are privvy to some very secret things.”

“Okay, then. I’ll talk to Pappas over the weekend.”

He darkened. “That would be a very grave mistake.”

She flinched, her eyes growing wider. “Are you threatening me?”

He moved with her and touched her arm. “I’m trying to protect you. Does the name Robert G. Durant mean anything to you?”

“Sure. He’s an underworld figure. Racketeering, drugs, the usual stuff.”

“And real estate, Julie. Robert Durant is a competitor for the riverfront and knows about the memo. Several times he has broken in here and trashed the place trying to find it. We even found blowtorch burns on the safe.” He smiled grimly. “He is a very dangerous man, Julie, and he will freely resort to crime to get what he wants. I’m not exaggerating when I say he’s dangerous.”

“I understand,” Julie said, “and frankly I’m not sure what to do. You’ll have to trust me over the weekend so I have time to figure this out.”

He nodded, looking strangely sad. “Is that the best I can get?”

“For now, Louis.”

“All right, then.” He offered her a hand, which she accepted, confused. “I’m in your hands now, Julie. Together we’ll see this thing through. Coffee now, or would you like that brandy?”

She chose coffee. And then, mercifully both for him and for her, they chatted about other things.

Four hours later she was in her tiny office at Pappas and Swain, attorneys-at-law, who were perpetually busy with other high-paying things, leaving the lion’s share of petty legal duties, research, and minor torts to the underdogs, Julie and the like. She had a yellow legal pad on her cluttered desk, and she was writing. Her free hand fingered the gold necklace as she wrote:

Julie Hastings
Mrs. Peyton Westlake
Mrs. Julie Hastings-Westlake
Peyton’s Old Lady

She smiled and threw the pen against a stack of unread briefs in bulging folders, a stack that crawled all the way up the wall and almost to the ceiling in the far corner of this oversize closet of an office. And then she went to lunch, though she wasn’t even hungry.

She got back an hour later and dialed Peyton’s lab phone to see if he had the memorandum, or if it was still at his apartment.

“Groovy,” she said aloud as the phone rang and rang. “Hey, Peyton baby! This is your old lady calling!”

But no one answered.

6

Peyton

A
T THE SAME
moment Julie was beginning her discussion with Louis Strack, Peyton was hiking through the weeds and cattails that infested the riverbank, making his way toward the crumbling nightmare that was his cut-rate laboratory. The air was thick and humid on this Friday, the stench of the river blowing off the water like a putrid gas. Peyton reminded himself that as soon as this skin thing was over (for better or for worse), he would conquer pollution. After that he would take a year off in Tahiti.

Yakky was already waiting at the door. He popped to his feet and almost bowed; Peyton suppressed a smile.

“Good morning to you, Yak, old chum. How’s the world?”

Yakky looked perplexed. “The world? Well, I believe there is a famine under way in Africa. A jet plane crashed last night and killed everybody. The weather is supposed to be hot today, and—”

“Please,” Peyton said. “Local news only.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” He unlocked the door and waved Yakky in. “Today we make a breakthrough, Yak, and may the nasty ninety-nine plague us no more. Stopwatch ready and able?”

“Stopwatch upstairs, Dr. Westlake.”

“Peyton, Yakky. Just Peyton.”

“Okay, Dr. Peyton.”

They went up the stairs. Yakky eyed the ruined fifth step hatefully; Peyton stepped over it as if it had been broken years ago. “Sorry I didn’t make it back yesterday,” he said. “I got tied up with some personal stuff. I owe you a pizza, I guess.”

Personal stuff? You mean, like making a total ass of yourself at Bowser’s, where people eat on the effing sidewalk?

“Is no problem, Dr. Peyton. I locked up good.”

“I knew you could handle it, Yak. Did you see what happened to the skin at ninety-nine minutes?”

“Yes. It melted. It was almost on fire. Didn’t smell good, either.”

“Did you cut a slice of it and watch the cell destruction under the microscope?”

“Uh-huh, but I was almost too late. Complete fragmentation. The skin self-destructed. How come?”

At the top of the stairs, Peyton flipped the light on. The lone bulb stuttered on, not seeming sure if it wanted to do this today. “Yak,” he said, “if I knew why its life span is only ninety-nine minutes, I would be a happy man indeed.”

“Have you tried an alkaline solution?” Yakky asked, slipping into a fresh lab coat. “Maybe ten percent?”

Peyton smiled sadly as he rummaged through the bag for a coat. “You’re good, Yak, but yes, I’ve tried ten percent, twenty, even fifty or more. They all were busts.”

“Bust?”

“Failure.”

“So what next?”

“We keep on trying, I guess. Any more suggestions?”

Yakky shrugged. “Maybe try some heat?”

“Sorry. Heat speeds up the fragmentation.”

Yakky walked over to the lab table beside the computer. He picked up what remained of the nose Peyton had made yesterday. It was mushy and dripping, looking for all the world like wet toilet paper. There were large blisters and holes in it. Yakky made a face. “How about electricity? You use it to make the substance, so why not keep it charged?”

Peyton sat down on a tall metal stool and hooked his heels on the bottom rung. He put his hands together. “That would be defeating the purpose, Yak. This is supposed to be synthetic skin for burn victims. Are they supposed to walk around with a dozen car batteries on their backs? Actually, I
did
try electricity. Results: el crappo.”

“Crappo?”

“Failure.”

Yakky frowned. “Some language this English is. You have five words for the same thing.”

“Keeps us occupied,” Peyton said. “Any more brainstorms?”

“Brainstorms?”

Peyton sighed. “Ideas, Yak. Got any more?”

He thought about it. “How about freezing?”

“What, and keep the patient in a meat locker for the rest of his life? No way.”

“Some sort of sealant? To keep the air away from the artificial tissue?”

“And have the patient walk around inside a giant Glad bag?”

“Glad bag?”

“Ah, Christ. Let’s just make a batch and see what happens. What would you like today? Lips? Chin?”

“How about a whole face? Have you ever tried that?”

“Just makes a bigger mess when it fragments.” Peyton hung his head. “Yak, why in the hell can’t I give up on this? Thirty thousand dollars and fifteen months later, I’m back where I started. The vivification process was easy. Tissue rejection? I beat that monster. So what’s missing? Why can’t I make the cells stable? Tell you what—why don’t we chuck everything out the window and see what floats.”

He saw Yakky doing mental battles with his vocabulary. “Chuck equals toss, Yak. See what floats means see if anything is salvageable. Oh, no. Salvageable means worth saving. Follow me?”

Yakky took off his half-pound glasses and wiped them on his shirt. “Certainly, Dr. Peyton. In Osaka I was the best English talker of the whole school.”

“Any more ideas, then, you English talker, you?”

“Pizza break?”

“Sounds fine. Do you like green peppers?”

Yakky wagged a hand. “So-so.”

“Let’s find the phone, then.” He pointed to the floor. “Follow that wire.”

Yakky followed it. The phone was behind the aquarium tank of pink soup, for reasons only Peyton might know. Yakky carried it to him.

“Got this one memorized,” Peyton said, bringing the receiver to his ear. He frowned suddenly. “Wait, I forgot my wallet. Have you got any cash?”

“Not until payday.”

“To hell with it.” He put the receiver back onto the cradle. “Let’s make you a new face.”