Deadline (16 page)

‘Jesus, you're all heart,' I said. ‘Like your two murderous hired hands, you're a walking charity.'

‘Every now and then there's a little tone creeps into your voice I don't think I like,' he said. ‘It's smartass. It's sarcastic. You deliver sentences from the side of your mouth like tired old vaudeville gags. Play the game the way I drew up the rules, Lomax. Don't cheapen yourself with unworthy comments. I like refined people.'

‘Such as yourself?' I suggested.

‘There's that tone again,' he said. I heard him sigh.

‘Who are you working for?' I asked. ‘Or are you self-employed?'

‘These are
verboten
areas. You should know better.'

‘You want power over Emily. Maybe you want to ruin her. OK. But where are you coming from? A political angle? A criminal one? Or are you a middleman who just wants information so that he can sell it to the highest bidder?'

‘Are you trying to rattle me, Lomax? I prefer self-control at all times.'

‘You hate chaos,' I said.

‘I hate chaos, yes,' he said.

‘You're a law-and-order sort,' I said.

‘Who or what I am isn't your concern, Lomax.'

I kept pressing, thinking I might force him to reveal something inadvertently. Or maybe I just wanted to irk him. ‘You like hiding away from me, don't you? You couldn't stand the idea of meeting me face to face, could you? You couldn't look me straight in the eye, because you don't have what it takes for that kind of contact. You're cowardly. You lack guts.'

He laughed. ‘You're a card, Lomax,' he said. ‘But we have business to conduct, a clock is ticking in the background. And you're beginning to drag on me … Here. Speak to your wife. And keep this in mind: Unless you cooperate, this may be the last time you'll ever talk with her. Quite a consideration, my friend. Quite a possibility. Months of total quiet. Years of silence. An eternity. A place where all the clocks are frozen and stopped.'

‘We'll meet one day,' I said.

‘I doubt it, Lomax.'

‘We'll meet and –' but before I could finish my sentence and whatever threat I was trying to formulate, Sondra came on the line again.

‘Sweetie. Is that you?' she asked.

‘Are you OK? Are you feeling OK?'

‘I'm just cruising, honey.'

‘Hang in there.'

‘I think I felt something, Jerry.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like the baby kicking.'

‘It's a little too early for that, love.'

‘There. There it is again. Ooooeee. Jerry. It's spooky.'

I heard her laugh as if somebody was tickling her, and then the line went dead. I thought of Sondra and the phantom kick of the fetus in her stomach and I wondered how much dope was running through her blood.

And then I thought of Emily Ford's soul.

It was six-twenty on the dashboard clock and I'd made a deal with the devil.

6.30 p.m.

The street where Emily Ford lived was one of large houses on large lots. It lacked architectural unity: the homes here had come into existence before the demands of planning permits. Ranch-style, neo-plantation, a couple of stabs at truly stark modernism – it was like a street of architectural samples: pick the one you like and builders will replicate it on the lot of your choice.

I phoned her just before I reached her house, which was a two-storey redbrick surrounded by palms; I watched the rearview mirror, which had become now as much of a habit as blinking an eye. Nobody had followed me, I was sure of it. Nobody had seen me in Jane Steel's car. I felt a little jolt of victory. I'd skipped out on my guards. I was free of them.

It took Emily about thirty seconds to answer the phone. I told her where I was, asked her to open her garage for me. She sounded surprised to hear from me. A little guarded, maybe, as if she had a rule that no visitors were allowed without an invitation, and I'd just broken it.

I turned the car into the drive as the garage door slid upward; then it shut behind me and I got out of the Honda. Emily stood in the doorway that led into the kitchen.

‘Traded down?' She nodded at my car.

‘For the sake of necessity,' I said.

She turned, went inside the kitchen, and I followed. It was a large room with old-fashioned pine cabinets; sliding glass doors led to a patio area where a parasol with the word
Absolut
printed on it shaded a table. Beyond the table was the swimming-pool. There was a sky-blue stillness about the yard, like a California postcard. I followed Emily out, and we sat under the parasol. My bones ached as I lowered myself into a chair; when I sucked in air, there were little flickers of pain through my chest.

Emily poured lemonade from a pitcher. I drank hastily; I was ash-dry. Also I was faintly hungry, but the idea of food sickened me. I hadn't eaten since … when – breakfast? Breakfast was ancient history, another life. I saw Sondra pop a segment of orange into her mouth. I heard her say:
Maybe I'll cook something terrific tonight.

I heard her say:
I'll probably be home before you.

I remembered holding her against me and feeling the rich warmth of her. I remembered saying I should contact Sweetzer about the role I'd play in the birth.

I heard her say:
Gotta go.

And then she'd disappeared, and the doorway was just empty space. Her car started up outside the house. Our home. She drove down the street.

She vanished on a videotape inside a parking-garage.

I set my glass down and looked at Emily. I told her about the delivery of the lock of Sondra's hair. I mentioned the fact that I was being followed, and that we'd been seen leaving Otto's.

‘Did anyone see you come here?' she asked.

‘I don't think so.'

‘But you don't know.'

‘Not one hundred per cent.'

‘This isn't your kind of game, Jerry. This is something you've never played before. You think by driving a different car you can fool these people? It isn't always that simple. They might be watching my house. If they know that you and I have met, why wouldn't they detail somebody to keep an eye on my home? Didn't that cross your mind?'

I hadn't considered the possibility. Maybe I didn't have the instinctive cunning of self-preservation, that cutting sense. Maybe I'd had it once, years before in New York State, but it had softened or withered here in the sun.

She picked up a cordless phone and punched in two digits. I assumed it was some kind of walkie-talkie system. She spoke in a quiet tone. ‘Sy, I want you to take a walk down the street … Yeah, just be casual, make like you're strolling … If you see any guys sitting in a parked car, anything unusual, let me know.' She shut the phone off, looked at me. ‘My police protection. I have two guys that watch round the clock. Sy Lancing's one of them. It's a perk of the job. Probably the only one.'

‘Makes you feel secure?' I said.

‘Nothing makes me feel secure, Jerry.'

I finished my lemonade, then told her about Sondra's car and the videotape of the abduction in the parking-garage at LaBrea; and the murder of George Rocco. She stared in a gloomy way at the swimming-pool. A bee drifted close to her eyelids and she smacked it aside. It fell into the pitcher of lemonade and skidded around on the surface, buzzing furiously.

Then I raised the subject of the dummy file and how it had been rejected.

‘So you didn't fool them,' she said.

‘No.'

‘What now? What do they want now?'

‘The original,' I said. The lie came easily to me. I wasn't ready to tell her the truth. I thought of the envelope in the safe-deposit box in Santa Monica. I should have collected it when I'd had the chance. Now I imagined the bank shut, security sensors activated, the place empty.

‘And I've got until ten o'clock in which to provide it,' I said.

‘There's been an ultimatum?'

‘If you want to call it that.'

‘Ten o'clock. Why?'

‘Why what? Why ten o'clock, do you mean?'

‘No, why an ultimatum of any kind? I hate to say this, but in his position I'd start by sending you Sondra's ear in a cardboard box. I wouldn't waste my time on locks of goddam
hair
, Jerry.'

I pressed the palms of my hands together. My hands were cold. ‘He's so damn determined to get his hands on what he wants that he makes allowances, cuts me some slack, makes a little leeway. Maybe he's got a lot to lose if he doesn't produce. And just maybe, in his heart of hearts, he doesn't really
want
to harm Sondra.'

‘Dreamtime, Jerry,' she said. ‘Ding-dong.'

‘Probably. But I have to believe she'll be returned to me.'

Emily was silent. She looked stressed and pale. I'd seen her this way before – a couple of times during our sessions, and once or twice when she was under hypnosis, speaking in a stilted way about her slain parents, and the overpowering feelings of hatred she'd experienced when she'd seen Billy Fear in court. The urge she'd had to stand up and shoot him where he sat, just like that, pop-pop-pop in the direct center of his face.
If only I'd smuggled a gun into court
, she'd said.

I remembered one time I'd had to slap her gently on the face to bring her out of a hypnotic trance. She had seemed unwilling to surface, a resistance almost unique in my experience. Billy Fear roamed her dreams. Billy Fear was everything that had ever scared her. His name was engraved on her like a black tattoo.

Did you want him dead?
I asked.

More than I wanted to go on living
, she'd said.

She got up. ‘Let's go indoors.'

I followed her into the big living-room of her house. It was furnished in a traditional way, matching sofa and armchairs, framed diplomas on the walls. A caged finch banged its head into a tiny mirror, time and again. I sat on the sofa, hunched forward.

She said, ‘You look crummy, Jerry. Shop-worn.'

‘I had a confrontation,' I explained. ‘I was provoked by a couple of passing thugs.' I wanted another shot at them, I realized. I wanted to make a violent response; maybe that chance would come one way or another eventually.

‘You handled yourself well, I assume?'

‘Well? I was like the goddam Terminator.'

Emily smiled in a weary way; it lasted a couple of seconds. Then she said, ‘Those Washington characters didn't like me, Jerry. I got the feeling the little blond number wanted to eviscerate me with her eyebrow tweezers. She had this smug I-see-where-you're-coming-from-look. I think I'm hanging by a goddam thread. Thinner than a thread. Christ knows what they'll take back to the White House. I have a feeling that my nomination is sinking into troubled waters. And I'm not sure how to save it.'

Her nomination. Did anything else in her life really matter? She hadn't asked for details about the death of George Rocco, she hadn't wanted to know the particulars of Sondra's abduction, nor had she inquired about the encounter I'd had with the two thugs. It was as if these things took place in a world that ran parallel to her own; external events were shadows on the wall, and not all that important to her.

I thought of Carrie Vasuu and Brunton.

I thought of how I'd protected Emily when I'd talked to them.

How I'd misled them.

There was absolutely no doubt that the experience of murder had seeped into Emily's belief-system, shaping and cementing her views on crime and punishment. And the death of Billy Fear had filled her with elation, a weird glassy-eyed joy I'd never seen in her before. She might have been richly stoned on a satisfying narcotic. I remembered the day after Billy Fear's shooting, when she'd entered my office and said, in a sing-song way,
The motherfucker's dead. The motherfucker's dead. Ask me if I'm ecstatic, Jerry. Ask me if I'm happy.

Now I didn't know how I could continue to protect her.

I looked across the yard, the trim grass, the shrubbery. The sun over the city was a faded ochre color, and weary-looking, like the eye of a man numbed by the repetitions of rising and falling. I thought of the list of patients I'd given Emily; I wondered what she'd learned by running the names through her super-computer. I wondered if she'd tell me everything, or if there might be some nugget she'd conceal for reasons of her own.

Trust her, Jerry. Take her at face value.

But which of her faces? The shattered woman who'd found the bodies of her murdered parents and who'd come to me for treatment? The individual so tormented by her past that she'd built impenetrable walls around it? The ambitious, hard-driven former LA County Attorney who'd caught a tantalizing whiff of the power that drifted out of the White House like so much smoke from the Vatican? The helpful soul who'd offered to enter into a partnership with me because she wanted me to get my wife back?

I asked, ‘Did you check the names?'

‘Yeah.' She gestured to a manila folder that lay on a coffee-table. I had a sense she was holding something back, but it would come out eventually, whatever it was.

‘And?' I was impatient. I could hear it in my voice. Time had become a hawk on my shoulder. Claws hooked into my skin, I could hear the ruffle of its feathers, and I knew if I looked sideways I'd see a malevolent eye glint.

‘You're not going to like this.'

‘Try me,' I said.

She reached for the folder and removed the list of names, which she gave to me. I ran my eye down it to where she'd drawn a small red asterisk.

‘The one I marked,' she said.

I gazed at the name. ‘What about it?'

‘He doesn't exist, Jerry.'

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?'

‘
Phil Stam does not exist
, Jerry. He has no social-security number. No driver's license. The address he provided you is a fake. The IRS doesn't know him. He's never paid income taxes. There's no record of him ever having been born.'