Deadline (14 page)

I raised a hand to divert the blow if I could.

‘Hey-hey, what is
this
?'

The brass froze in descent. The fair-haired man turned his face in the direction of the voice, and Big Skull fumbled for something hidden in the flap of his jacket. I raised my head just enough to see George Rocco coming running towards us. He was taking his pistol out of its holster.

‘What are these fucks doing to you, doc?' Rocco shouted, as he ran to where I lay. He fired his pistol into the air, a warning shot, and he kept coming.

The man with the big skull had a gun in his fist, some kind of automatic, and he fired it a couple of times at Rocco, whose uniform appeared to explode. I thought:
Hollywood – chicken blood in plastic bags strapped to tiny detonators hidden under the uniform, somebody will shout ‘Cut!
' I was thinking the way my wife might have done. As George Rocco took a few steps back, I was still waiting for the director's voice.

This is how we deal with reality we can't face: we place it inside another frame of reference that is only tangentially connected to the world we inhabit.
Or maybe not connected at all. George Rocco was still alive. Even as he lay there with his blood oozing out of him, his life flying away, there was a place in which he was still alive.

I'd lost it.

I was thinking lunatic thoughts. I was stunned. How casually George Rocco had been shot. Like he was a nothing, a sub-human, worthless. An inert target.

The gunman stuck his weapon back inside his jacket. He looked at the fair-haired guy, shrugged and said, ‘It was him or it was me.'

‘It sure was.' The guy's bracelet rattled. It reflected dull light.

‘Let's blow this place,' Big Skull said.

‘And the doc?'

‘The doc can get in his car and just drive the hell away. He didn't see anything, anyhow. There was nothing to see. Right? Right, doc?'

I gazed at him, didn't speak. Couldn't.

‘What about the security camera?' the fair-haired guy asked.

Big Skull said, ‘We'll just go locate the fucking tape. Whatever it takes.' He stared at me. ‘Hey you, doc. Move it. Drive. Now. Let me hear you burn a little rubber. Nothing happened here. Remember that.'

I watched the two men hurry away. I thought of McGloan bent over a paperback tale of old corpses and pathologists, the detectives of death; in a couple of minutes his door would be kicked down and his novel would drop out of his hands. And then –

I didn't want to project. I hauled myself towards my car, dragged myself up, got in behind the wheel, turned the key in the ignition. I glanced at George Rocco. I thought of stopping, I wanted to stop – but I couldn't help him. No mouth-to-mouth was going to bring him back, no crazy rush through the city in the back of an ambulance, his body hooked up to tubes – he was beyond all that.

5.52 p.m.

In the lobby of my building, I asked Grogue: ‘You still have a key to my office, John?'

‘Always do, doc,' he said. He surveyed me; he must have noticed the oil-stains on my suit, observed the awkward way I was holding myself. But he said nothing. My ribcage ached as if the bones were held together by wire. I felt like a prehistoric skeleton, reconstructed for a natural history display. I couldn't get rid of George Rocco's image. When I closed my eyes, I could still see him. He was dead and it was my fault for asking questions. If I hadn't spoken to him, he'd still be alive.

If I'd just handed over the goddam envelope from the safe-deposit box. But I hadn't. And why not? Was it some underlying macho turbine that drove me? Some skewed sense of ethics that lingered still? I remembered the voice on the telephone.
You still feel a responsibility towards her. Dare I say a fondness, even?
Was that what it came down to finally – that I cared, in my own fashion, in a manner that wasn't absolutely professional, for Emily Ford?

‘Mind if see it?' I asked.

‘No problem.' Grogue unlocked a drawer in his desk with a silver key attached to a chain of keys, and took out a small envelope marked
Dr Lomax.
The key to my office suite was inside. He showed it to me, a little grudgingly.

‘Have you ever mislaid this key, John?'

Grogue looked at me as if the idea of him losing a key indicated a suspension of natural law. ‘Never.'

‘So there's no chance somebody could have taken it and made a copy?'

Grogue laughed, a kind of rattling sound, pebbles loose in his throat. ‘They'd need the key to my drawer first. And that never leaves this chain.' He flashed his chain of keys. I looked at his uniform. Dark blue serge, the Sunset Beach Holdings logo – a gaudy orange half-sun sinking behind a bed of blue – stitched to the breast pocket. Sunset Beach Holdings owned a dozen office complexes in the city.

I leaned over, glanced at Grogue's drawer. It was filled with keys, paperclips, Bandaids, postage stamps, rubber bands. The lock looked flimsy; anyone with some expertise might open it in twenty seconds with a metal pick.

‘What's all this about, anyhow?' Grogue asked.

I came up with an excuse that struck me as feeble. ‘I'm thinking of raising the insurance on my office and its contents, John. You know how it goes. The insurance company will send a guy out to check the existing security. I was curious, that's all.'

Grogue looked halfway convinced. ‘No Tom, Dick or Harry comes here and walks straight past my desk to the elevators without stating his express purpose to me. That's what I call security, doc.'

I told him he was doing a good job and thanked him. I heard him slam his desk drawer shut as I walked to the elevator. I stepped inside the car and rode up to the seventh floor. Jane was at her desk when I entered my suite. She looked at me in a grave way. She was too polite to ask, but I could hear her questions, anyway:
What's going on, Jerry? Why do you look like something the dog dragged in?

I asked if there had been any messages. Harry Pushkas had called a couple of times.

‘Where do you keep your office key, Jane?'

‘It's in my purse,' she said.

‘And it's never out of sight?'

‘Most women don't stray very far from their purses, Jerry. You should know that. It's a security thing.'

‘When you go home at night, the key stays in the purse?' I was sinking into a morass of keys and possible duplicates and locks.

‘Correct,' Jane said. ‘And the purse sits on the bedside table.'

‘Has anybody ever broken into your home?'

‘No,' she said, and she looked at me. ‘Jerry, what's going on here?'

I wasn't sure how much to tell her. I skipped over her question and asked one of my own. ‘Has anybody ever threatened you in any way?'

‘
Threatened
me? I'm not sure I follow.'

‘Has anyone ever said they'd hurt you if you didn't do them a certain favor?'

‘I don't know where this is going,' she said. ‘Nobody's threatened me. Besides, I can look after myself. I carry a pistol everywhere I go. At night I keep it beside the bed.'

A pistol? I was surprised. I couldn't imagine Jane having a gun. But there was an ocean of guns in this land. Guns were part of our culture, our birthright. They were the major icon of our democracy. Why shouldn't Jane have a pistol? A woman who lived alone needed a handgun in a climate of violence.

‘It's a Jennings J-25, six-shot magazine,' she said. ‘I go target-shooting a couple of nights a week. I've also developed a social life with other gun-owners. You'd be surprised. They're nice people. They're not all rednecks.'

I speculated on how little I really knew about Jane, what she did when she left work, how she lived her life. I knew she had an apartment in one of the canyons, and that was all. Now I had to start filling in blanks, and imagine a life that included target-practice and – what? Line-dancing? Barbecues with fellow shooters? Did they discuss the relative merits of Heckler & Kochs and Glocks, or how much they approved of Emily Ford's position on gun laws and law enforcement? I was brain-dead when it came to pistols. I couldn't work up an interest in them.

I heard the echo of the automatic in the parking-garage, remembered how George Rocco had expelled air as he dropped to the ground. I loathed guns, that whole killing culture.

‘Speak to me, Jerry,' she said.

‘OK. A file's missing from my office.'

‘Are you sure it hasn't just been mislaid?'

‘I'm sure. It was in my floor-safe, now it's not.'

‘You sure you didn't take it home with you?'

I said I hadn't.

‘You think it's been stolen?'

I shrugged, then I went inside my own office and shut the door behind me before Jane had time to ask me if I'd thought about calling the cops. I walked around the edges of the rug, trying to imagine an intruder here. Somebody rolling the rug back. Opening the safe. Plucking out Emily Ford's records. Walking away. Easy as that. I tried to put a face to this thief. One of my patients? I scanned their faces in my mind. It was absurd. How could I imagine Joe Allardyce in a clandestine role? Or Teddy Newberg, a schizophrenic scriptwriter, or Callie Wronk, an angelic twenty-year-old obsessive-compulsive from Venice Beach, or any of the others who came to me for therapy – how could I ascribe this theft to any of them? And yet –

I looked at Sondra's photograph on my desk, taken two years ago. She was smiling into the camera. She was carefree and lovely and the world was filled with promise. I felt a stab of bitterness, anger. Why hadn't I built an elaborate high-tech security fence around our whole life? Something capable of charbroiling anyone who tried to intrude? We'd have been secure behind it, Sondra and I. We'd have stayed home in our sealed enclave and made love behind steel shutters that snapped shut at the slightest sound. And life, cocooned, protected by electronic sensors, would have gone on. I was suddenly weary, enervated – what was I doing, playing detective, asking questions about locks and goddam keys and wondering who to trust? I was a trained psychiatrist, for God's sake. I was living in a world I hadn't chosen for myself. But I'd been forced into it, hammered like a nail into a plank of hard wood.

I fingered my ribs lightly, then I went inside the bathroom and put my head under the cold-water faucet. I took a towel and dabbed at the soiled spots on my jacket and pants. Then I ran a comb through my hair.

Presentable. Up to a point.

I needed to move. Forget the goddam keys. Forget who had one and who didn't, and whose might have been stolen and copied. I thought of the list I'd given Emily Ford. I imagined her going through the names, feeding each into the brain of the computer, links and connections and buzzing in cyberspace … But how did I know she was
really
doing that? How did I know she didn't want the list for some other inscrutable purpose? What if she somehow contrived to get her records back and didn't tell me?

I needed to know what Emily Ford had discovered, if her wonderful computer had spat out anything that might bring me nearer to Sondra.

Problem: how did I contact Emily if I'd been forbidden by people who thought nothing of murder? While I was thinking my way around that, I called Kit Webb at the hospital. I asked him about Consuela.

‘She'll be fine,' Kit said. ‘Gastric lavage to the rescue. She's pretty dopey right now, but she'll be
compos mentis
in a couple of hours. You going to give me some details of her OD?'

‘Later,' I said. ‘I owe you, Kit.'

‘I'll think of something.'

‘Has she said anything about what happened?'

‘She's not saying much of anything, Jerry. If she speaks, it's mainly mumble.'

I put the phone down, picked it up again, dialed Emily Ford's office. An assistant informed me she'd gone home. I knew where she lived: if I wanted to see her, I'd go to her house near Sunset. The trick was to make sure I wouldn't be followed there. I stood by the telephone and wondered about this for a moment – how could I make myself invisible? How could I avoid detection?

I stepped into the reception room.

Jane looked at me, but didn't ask anything.

‘My car's busted,' I said.

‘Don't tell me,' she said. ‘You need mine?'

‘Does that cause you a problem?'

‘Not really.'

‘Take money out of petty cash for a cab home,' I said.

She opened the middle drawer of her desk and removed a car key attached to a bright red Goofy keyring. I thanked her, told her I'd call her later at home to make an arrangement for returning the car, then went down to the lobby. I could have traded her my BMW for her car, but there was a chance she'd be mistakenly followed if she was driving my vehicle, and I didn't want her dragged into this. I didn't want to think of her and George Rocco sharing a common destiny.

I stepped into the elevator. On the way down, I had a moment of dizziness, tidal drift, as my ribs flared with pain. By the time I reached the lobby it had passed.

As I walked out of the elevator, I saw Harry Pushkas coming towards me. He had his arms extended in a friendly way, and when I got within touching distance he hugged me. His breath smelled of cognac. His black hair, which he dyed, stood up from his scalp as if he'd received an electric shock.

Harry stepped back and looked at me. ‘You tell your secretary to cancel lunch with me? You can't tell me yourself, hot-shot? This I find an insult. Old friends cancel their own lunch dates.'

‘I'm sorry, Harry. Something came up.'

‘Something came up? What? You had a fight with your dry-cleaner?'
Some-zing.
He fingered the lapels of my jacket, like a concerned father assessing his son's clothing. He shook his head. ‘You got a stain here, another here.'

‘Harry, I'm pushed for time. Maybe we can get together later.'