Deadline (12 page)

Do it now
, I thought,
before you change your mind.

I got out of the car. I entered the bank, a place of glossy marble surfaces and steel, and a sense of money hoarded in bomb-proof vaults. I told a sullen woman at the Customer Service desk that I wanted access to my safe-deposit box. She asked for ID, ran me through her computer, then escorted me down a flight of stairs to the safe-deposit room. She didn't speak. She liked being aloof. She'd probably done a college course in Aloof, maybe even obtained a certificate. I had a deep, instinctive dislike of her.

We inserted our keys, I removed the box, took it into a small private room, opened it, looked at a rectangular white envelope that measured about six inches by four.

I didn't touch it. I didn't want to touch it. I wanted it to stay right where it was.

Take it, Jerry. You're going to need it.

I lowered my hand, pressed my fingertips against the envelope. I felt the hard, flat object it contained.

I thought:
Don't give in. Not yet.
And I was angry again. Angry with the abduction, sure, but it was more than that now – it was the manipulation, the way I was being followed, the threat of the two guys. Fuck them. I wasn't giving up this envelope just yet. Its contents were a last resort. I closed the box – I had the thought:
You may live to regret this
– then returned the box to its drawer. The woman and I turned our keys, then I rushed up the stairs ahead of her.

In the foyer, I encountered Bo Sonderheim, the bank manager. He was an open-faced, kindly man I knew socially. He was from New York State and we shared a mild interest in the fortunes of the Buffalo Bills. He wore a short-sleeved taupe shirt, a brown necktie, and brown pants. He smiled, genuinely pleased to see me.

‘Jerry, long time, too long,' he said. He grabbed my hand, shook it hard.

‘I've been busy. You know how it is.'

‘LA's a great town in your line of business,' he said. A banker's quiet joke; a slight wink. ‘How's Sondra?'

‘Expecting,' I said. I felt cold. I shivered very slightly.

Bo Sonderheim clapped my arm. ‘That's terrific, Jerry.'

‘We're excited.'

‘So you should be,' he said. ‘Listen, call me when you've got some spare time. We'll get together. You look like you could use a night on the town. You're pale, Jerry, way too pale.'

I said something inane about recovering from flu. He nodded his head in sympathy. ‘A bug's going round,' he said.

‘There's always a bug going round,' I replied. We smiled, shook hands, I promised I'd call him. It was all very pleasant in a superficial way. I waved, hurried to my car.

I was half-tempted to go back inside the bank and get the goddam envelope. Why leave it in its steel box? Why not give them what they wanted? I thought about the phone call. The guy holding Sondra was good at cruelty, at twisting the knife. The way he'd said
pregnant
, the menacing spin he'd put on the word –

No,
goddam
them. I wasn't going to be pushed around. There was something of Buffalo in me even now – something of the small hard-assed, working-class streets, of the raw neighborhood taverns where men smelled of sweat and iron and smoked cigarettes down to the last possible strand, of a city where winter lasted for five months. Yes, it was still there – I hadn't surrendered that upbringing entirely in this Mickey Mouse State.

5.05 p.m.

I ran a red light on my way to the Pacifica Center on La Cienega Boulevard, where LaBrea Records had its offices. I sailed through an intersection illegally, swerving to avoid a truck. I wasn't giving my full attention to what lay ahead; I was more interested in what might be traveling behind. The old Pontiac somewhere at my back, maybe, or a different vehicle occupied by a different pair of guys – either way, I couldn't know. I felt a strange, numb terror. I was moving through a world that had the consistency of molasses.

I reached the Pacifica Center, a smoked glass and weathered brass building fourteen stories high. Navajo symbols had been embossed in brass panels – stylized feathers, eagles, horses. A huge twenty-four-hour video and music store called
Look & Listen
occupied the ground floor. The first floor housed a number of small fashion boutiques that came and went in flurries of bankruptcies. I passed below the unlit neon sign that read
LaBrea
in fashionably illegible script; after dark, it glowed red and purple, hanging halfway up the building as if it were some kind of gaudy electric spider attempting to reach the summit.

I thought of Sondra going inside this tower five, sometimes six, days a week. I thought of her office on the tenth floor, in the marketing department. The posters. The CD covers. The buzz of the music biz. Phones forever ringing. Petulant musicians, trumped-up by sycophantic press items, demanding to know why their albums hadn't hit the
Billboard
Top Fifty. I'd always found these characters dull and inarticulate the few times I'd accompanied Sondra to a LaBrea promo party. They played at being deeply cool; they had no idea they were ineluctably heading towards their own obsolescence, fickle as the public was. Sondra was good with these narcissists and their frail egos.

Had she made it as far as LaBrea before she was abducted? I circled the building, found a parking-slot, idled for a couple of minutes and watched traffic go past. I was looking for the Pontiac, sure, but I was also keeping an eye open for any vehicle that looked … what? Suspicious? What the hell would constitute a ‘suspicious' vehicle, anyhow? I was traveling up the paranoid escalator. I had to take a chance and move. And if the watchers were watching, I couldn't see them; and even if I could, what would it take to avoid them?

I drove back round the block and into a five-level parking garage, where a sign read:
Free Parking for LaBrea Records Employees and Retail Customers Only.
I inserted a five-dollar bill into the automatic dispenser. A ticket slid out of the slot and I plucked it just as the yellow-black striped barrier rose like an arthritic arm.

Blinking in the sudden dimness of the place, I drove up through the levels slowly. If she'd come this far before vanishing, then maybe her car was here. I drove to the upper level, but saw nothing, no sign of the Lexus. Then I swung my car around and started down again, checking each parking-slot as I drove. A few of the cars were ostentatious – an old pink Caddie convertible, a bug tricked out in retro Dayglo, a white Packard hearse. The vehicles of wannabe rock stars.

On Level 3 I spotted a gray Lexus parked between an old Corvette and a low-slung, two-door MG sports. I'd missed it on the way up. I got out of my car and walked to the Lexus, thinking:
It can't be Sondra's, it's a commonplace car in LA, it could be anyone's.
Then I saw in the rear window the tiny logo of the car supplier,
Marco Motors of Brentwood
, where Sondra had bought the Lexus. So what? A lot of people probably bought their Lexus cars at Marco Motors.

I moved around the front of the vehicle.

A St Christopher medallion, fashioned out of copper, hung from the rearview mirror. I recognized it at once. I'd bought it for her two years ago when we were vacationing in Verona. She'd liked the detail in the face, the benign look. She was superstitious about religious medallions.

I wanted to break the glass and haul the thing from the mirror, hurl it off into the gloom. It hadn't protected Sondra. It hadn't done her any good. The car was unlocked, so I opened the door on the driver's side. The interior light clicked on. I didn't know what I was looking for – evidence of a struggle? Something her abductors had carelessly dropped? How goddam convenient that would be, and about as likely as her having the time to scribble a quick description of her assailants even as they dragged her out of the car. I imagined it that way – people pulling at her, perhaps her arm painfully twisted up behind her back, a hand clamped around her mouth. I could picture her kicking, resisting, as she was hauled off inside a waiting vehicle.

There was a copy of
Billboard
on the passenger seat. A couple of work files. And there, stuck between the seats, her wallet. I picked it up; it was wine-colored leather. It contained her driver's license, employee ID, Social Security card, a photograph of us snapped last year in San Diego, a picture of her parents.

And this, which brought me to the edge, which made me feel I was taking a step out into bottomless dark – a blank square of clear plastic she said she'd keep vacant for a baby. Whenever we had one.

If
we had one.

I slumped behind the wheel, lowered my head, dropped the purse to the floor. My throat was dry. The roof of my mouth. My lips.

I opened the door, I slid out. I kicked the door shut. This gray space yielded nothing, and the car was a mute witness. I paced around the Lexus, gazing at the ground, looking for what – clues? The butt of an obscure foreign cigarette – fortuitously dropped – would that establish the identity of one of her assailants? A credit-card receipt that had slipped out of a pocket, a laundry ticket?

In what goddam world of fancy? Not this one. Not where I lived.

I gazed up at the row of pale electric lamps spread at about twenty-feet intervals. I wondered what strength of lighting they used here. Forty watt? Less? The place was pocked with shadow, shadowy corners. Dire. The air smelled of burnt oil. I wanted out of here, back into the sun, the world –

Then I saw it. It hung approximately fifteen feet from the ground, and was fixed to the wall. Barely noticeable, it moved on a short stalk slowly from side to side. The lens scanned me, then moved past.
Yes
, I thought.

I walked until I stood directly under the security camera and I wondered where the videotapes it created were stored. In this building someplace, I guessed – but where?

I parked my car in a vacant slot and walked from the parking-garage through a door that led to an elevator. I was on Level 2. I pressed the
Call
button, and when the car came, I rode down to the ground floor. I entered
Look & Listen
, where I was immediately assaulted by a violent fusillade of noise – videotapes playing on a hundred enormous TV screens, music issuing from scores of speakers. It was babble, it was the future where you were assailed simultaneously from so many directions that your focus was shattered and concentration became an act consigned to history. You could go mad in these vast institutions of pictures and sounds; how did employees survive this attack on their senses? I walked through the store, under MTV clips of a rap group, a German techno-rock band, an old Sid Vicious punk video, tapes of the Marx Brothers in
A Day At The Races
, Bogart in
Casablanca
, James Dean dead drunk in
Giant.

The store clerks were mainly young women who looked like zombies, glazed and indifferent to the whirl around them. They had dark fingernails and glossy lips and clunky shoes. They didn't approach and ask if you needed assistance. That would have been uncool, if uncool was still a word in use. There was a form of consumer Darwinism at work here – if you couldn't find what you wanted on your own, you were doomed to do without.

A security guard stood at the exit to the street. He looked uncomfortable, conspicuous in his stiff maroon uniform. I made my way towards him between displays of CDs and videotapes. He was in his late forties and had the look of an ex-cop miles off his turf. His face was scarred. One side of his neck had evidence of skin-grafting, a map of puckered flesh. He'd been in a fire, probably pensioned from the force, and he supplemented his pension with private security work.

Guesswork.

He looked at me as if the appearance of somebody normal was the high-point of his day. Somebody in an ordinary suit, everyday shoes, and a necktie. Hallelujah. I wondered if his dreams were loud and raucous; when he slept, did his mind flash strobe-lights?

‘I need some information,' I said. ‘I wonder if you can help.'

He had a sweet smile, despite the scar that ran under his eye. He wore a badge with the words
George Rocco, Gardall Security.
‘Go ahead,' he said.

I mentioned the security cameras in the parking-garage. I asked if he knew where the tapes were kept, and how I could gain access to them. I tried to restrain any desperation in my voice, but George Rocco must have detected something, because his smile evaporated and the light in his eye went out.

‘The control room is the place you're looking for,' he said. ‘It's on the fourteenth floor. But it's not exactly a place where you can just go and poke around, know what I mean? You need a real good reason for going up there. You got one?'

I took out my wallet and handed him my card, and while I tried to think up an excuse – something to do with a kleptomaniac patient who specialized in stealing from parked cars – George Rocco said, ‘Hey, I
know
you! I know your name!'

I waited for him to say he'd read it in connection with a certain aging actress who'd tried to commit cocaine suicide, and who'd come to me as a patient when she'd failed. The matter had generated publicity – which was what the actress had wanted all along – and invariably my name was mentioned as her therapist. It wasn't the kind of attention I sought. Still, the exposure helped the actress, who went on to land a few choice roles. And, for myself, it brought me a couple of Hollywood neurotics whose basic problem lay in the fact that they had more money than they knew what to do with; they suffered more from economic ennui than any existential malaise.

‘You helped
Bobby Stone
,' he said.

‘You know Bobby?'

‘Hey, Bobby was my partner in the LAPD, man,' George Rocco said, seizing my hand, shaking it with such vigor I thought he'd block the flow of blood in my veins. ‘We were together the night it all went to hell. You turned him around, I got to hand it to you, doc. You turned him around real good.'