Deadline (18 page)

I thought about Gerson. I'd been to a party at his ostentatious home once, but I didn't have any special insights into his world. For all I knew, he could have connections in the same dank places as Nardini allegedly had them. I thought:
Fine, intriguing, but none of this is taking me closer to Sondra.
She was slipping further and further away, as if she'd been dragged out to sea by a hungry tide and I couldn't do a damn thing except watch from the shore.

I wondered if she'd fallen into a drugged sleep, if she was dreaming, the baby still and motionless in her womb. And then I was rushing into a place of dire possibilities, that space in the head where you imagined only the worst. Sondra had tried to escape and they'd shot her. She'd tried to climb from a window and lost her hold and fallen, and her neck was broken. She'd overdosed on drugs and slipped into a coma. The time-frame was a sham, a scam. She was already dead.

I thought:
Godammit, enough of this pressure, this anxiety and dread.
I'd get the man what he wanted, I'd give it to him after his next call.
I have the goods
, I'd say. I'd make the arrangements, and they'd give me Sondra back.

And I'd trade Emily Ford as if she were a baseball card I didn't need in my collection.

What would happen to her world then?

I looked at her face, and then away. I didn't have the heart to stare into her eyes. Suddenly, she leaned towards me and put her arms around me. I felt her hair against my eyelids, her cool hand moving to the side of my face, where it rested. The gesture touched me, even as it disturbed.

‘We'll work it out just fine in the end,' she said.

How could she sound so goddam confident?

I gazed back towards the garden, the shrubbery, and I saw one of Emily's private guards. For a moment I was stung by surprise, and upset; was it a coincidence, or was it something else, something of more sinister design? The man didn't know I'd seen him. He moved back into the shade of the shrubbery, it parted before him, he disappeared. It was the same man I'd glimpsed so briefly earlier, the one Emily had called Danny. I hadn't seen his face clearly at the time, but now I knew who Danny was.

Detective Petrosian.

Emily moved back from me, as if she were embarrassed by the spontaneity of her embrace. She pushed a strand of hair from her forehead in a brisk way. ‘You still don't really trust me, do you?'

The word ‘trust' was like a plum-pit in my throat. I wondered about Petrosian. Did he combine his regular cop duties with a little overtime protecting Emily? What were the chances that the cop investigating last night's assault on me would also be detailed to guard the home and person of the Chief Consultant to the West Coast Division of the Presidential Task Force On Crime? How many cops were on the LA payroll? How many thousands? What were the odds against Petrosian being involved with both me
and
Emily?

‘You didn't answer me,' she said. ‘About trust? Remember?'

I felt a certain tumbling inside, questions spinning wildly this way and that. What if she'd invented the cocaine story? How did I know she was telling the truth about Phil Stam? But why would she fabricate these things? What did she stand to gain?

Truth, falsehood, half-lies. I wanted to trust her, dear God, how I
wanted
to trust her. I wanted to trust somebody. I felt very alone, lost in a place where people and the words they uttered were prisms that distorted the purity of light. Now I wished I'd told Harry more, confided in him, because what you saw with Harry was what you got, there was nothing hidden, no rage of unfulfilled ambition, no empty office waiting for him in the justice department. I contrasted that with Emily's burning appetite for Washington, and it seemed to me that she might be capable of anything in her drive to get what she wanted.

‘I trust you,' I said quietly.

‘You lie so goddam badly, it's totally pathetic.'

‘I'm not having the best of days,' I said.

‘Yeah, and all this is a walk in the park for me too, Jerry. I don't think you can even begin to grasp what I stand to lose.'

‘You're not the only one that loses, Emily.'

‘Then let's have a little more faith here, huh? You think you can come up with just a wee bit more belief in me?'

She was asking
me
to trust her.

She'd never asked if she could trust
me.
We were in different playing-fields.

The things we plan to do with other people's lives. The little treacheries that sicken us.

I looked through the glass doors. The yard was empty. Maybe I'd never seen Petrosian. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity. And if it
had
been Petrosian, so what? It didn't have to mean anything sinister. It was an accident, a coincidence, Petrosian was sent wherever his superiors wanted to dispatch him, he didn't pick and choose his duties. It was my head playing sick games, looking for connections, little flashes of insight in the murk of things. But I felt choked, panicked, and I was under the pressure of time. I wondered if my anxiety showed on my face, or if I'd become good at hiding my feelings. Pain rippled suddenly through my chest and I clutched the area and sucked in my breath quickly.

‘You OK?' Emily asked.

‘Heartburn or something.'

I needed to get out of this house. Get away. I didn't want to sell Emily Ford. Not yet.

I knew where I had to go next. And I knew I had to move quickly. Time, what was the time? But I couldn't look at my watch, didn't want to, didn't want to think of seconds elapsing and hours rushing away from me, and the idea of a void at the end of it all. I'd been given less than four hours, and a part of that span had been devoured; the collapse of time was a kind of torture.

And he'd known that only too well when he'd given me what he called a ‘gift'. He'd set the clock running in my brain. He'd turned my life into pie-shaped segments of time, each slice dwindling all the time.
I'm an understanding guy when you get to know me
, he'd said. But not in any sympathetic way. No. What he understood was the nature of pain, and how to inflict it. He might just as well have touched me with a cattle-prod. The ‘gift' he'd given me wasn't one of time; it was of fear. He'd imposed upon me a timetable, a schedule that would eventually run out.

I walked to the door that led to the garage.

‘Where are you going?' Emily asked.

‘I'm not sure yet.'

‘You're lying again.'

I wanted to say:
Forgive me for what I might have to do. Forgive me if I have to trade your world for somebody else's. And even if it doesn't come to that, forgive me for thinking these thoughts.

‘Can you stay out of trouble?' she asked.

‘Who knows.'

‘Try,' she said. ‘As for me, I'm going to find Stam.'

‘How?'

‘Some people in this town owe me, Jerry. I'm not a complete pariah.'

‘Nobody ever said you were, Emily.'

‘Hey, I read my press. I don't have too many clippings I'd save. Some people think I'm the founder member of a local coven that meets every full moon to cast spells.'

‘Spells? What I heard was you don't do anything more harmful than test-drive new broomsticks.'

‘Malicious gossip.'

I walked into the hot garage, got into the Honda. The automatic door slid open. I saw Emily standing in the doorway that led to the kitchen. She was watching me but I couldn't see her expression.

‘Call me,' she shouted. ‘Use the cellphone.'

I backed into the driveway. Emily went into the kitchen, and the door swung shut behind her. I wondered what she'd do now, what contacts she'd work, what kind of juice she had.

I backed onto the street, and the garage door descended behind me.

A man in a stylish, lightweight powder-blue suit stepped around the Honda and moved towards the side of the house in a proprietorial manner; it wasn't Petrosian, but it was somebody vaguely familiar to me only I couldn't place him until he turned his head a fraction just before he vanished – with some haste, as if I wasn't meant to spot him – under the deep green fronds of a palm.

Then I knew.

7.36 p.m.

I sat in the passenger seat of Bobby Stone's treasured '67 Olds Cutlass in the parking-lot of a Ralph's market a few blocks from Sepulveda. Planes roared overhead; flying out of LAX or landing. The skies were crowded. I remembered my dream of planes colliding. How long ago that seemed. I checked the parking-lot. I was sure nobody had followed me here. As sure as I could be. I'd driven a circuitous route, even as I was conscious of the fact that I didn't have time to take a labyrinth of back streets, or drive through a maze of suburbs.

I thought of the guy stepping round the side of Emily Ford's house, the parting of fronds:
You're mistaken
, I told myself.
You're off the wall.
But there was no mistaking the eyes that were too close together and the memory they evoked of the scarf that muffled the mouth and the baseball cap and the knife that had turned out to be a prop.

Bobby was rolling a cigarette, filling a ZigZag paper with tobacco. His black hands, big and fire-scarred, worked at this task with the skilled patience of a craftsman.

I said, ‘Thanks for coming.'

‘No problemo,' Bobby Stone said. He stuck the skinny cigarette in his mouth and flicked flame from a gunmetal Zippo. ‘I owe you, Jerry.'

‘You don't owe me,' I said. ‘We did it together.'

‘What a team we made back then, hey?' Bobby Stone sucked deeply on his cigarette and his cheeks hollowed out. He was bald. After the fire, his hair hadn't grown back. A few scars crisscrossed his scalp, but they'd been diminished by cosmetic surgery and were hardly noticeable. His back, severely burned, had required twenty or more grafting operations. I tried to imagine the physical pain he'd undergone. I knew enough about the other scars, the ones inside, the ones we'd healed.

‘I was a wild sonofabitch,' he said. ‘I wanted the world in a goddam sandwich, so's I could chew it and spit it out. Funny how a guy changes.' He laughed, coughed, spluttered. Smoke came out of his nostrils. ‘I'm OK now. I'm getting along real well. The desk job keeps me outta mischief.'

‘You don't want to go back on the streets?' I said.

‘Naw, the streets are for younger animals. I'm pushing forty, doc. I did my time out there.'

I looked across the parking-lot. A few scattered cars, the lights in the market windows burning even though the sky wasn't dark yet; the sun was slipping down towards nightfall, but for the present it was a California dusk, pale-blue deepening to navy, here and there a splash of pink. Darkness was next. I suddenly wanted everything to stay just as it was. The sun frozen. Eternal twilight. I didn't want night and streetlights, that other world on the far side of daytime.

I didn't mention George Rocco's slaying. Bobby hadn't raised the matter; it was possible he hadn't heard of it yet. Another murder in LA, a security guard shot in a parking-garage; news at eleven.

‘You mind me saying you look like shit, doc?'

‘Thanks,' I said.

‘You got trouble, judging by the appearance of you.'

‘You could say,' I remarked. ‘You think he'll show?'

‘He's a funny cat,' Bobby said. ‘Keeps to himself. A loner. He told me he'd be here. But he was, like, reluctant … you wanna fill me in on all this, Jerry?'

‘I can't. Not now.'

Bobby Stone shrugged. ‘Holler if you need me, OK?'

‘I will.'

Bobby crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. A plastic daisy dangled from the rearview mirror on a length of red twine, and he put up his hand and touched the fake petals. I thought that perhaps it had some sentimental value for him, but I didn't ask. I knew his wife had left him in the wake of the fire when he'd been drinking and shooting up and every day was a day in hell, and that she'd taken their daughter – maybe this cheap flower was a souvenir of a kind. I wasn't going to pry.

‘You ever run into a Detective Petrosian?' I asked.

‘Once,' he said.

‘What do you know about him?'

Bobby Stone shook his head. ‘He's the guy they get when it comes to, like, celebrity protection. You know, when there's a federal judge being threatened by criminal types, or some movie hot-shot's being stalked, that kind of thing. It's like he has his own private colony inside the LAPD. He picks his own personnel, he's got maybe a half-dozen operatives at any given time. You don't hear much about his office.'

‘He wouldn't investigate an attempted robbery?' I asked.

Bobby smiled. ‘That would be way beneath him, doc. He might get his fingers dirty.'

‘The name Sy Lancing mean anything to you?'

‘He's one of Petrosian's gang. How come you're asking about Petrosian, anyway?'

‘Simple curiosity,' I said. I let this knowledge simmer inside. I wanted to see what shape it might assume when it was done on the back-burner.

Bobby Stone said, ‘For a guy who always told me to be open, you are into some very serious mystification these days, doc.' He looked across the parking-lot. ‘Here comes my man.'

I turned my face.

The man approaching the car walked with an exaggerated swaying motion; he might have been on a ship in a storm, and clutching ropes to keep his balance. He wore a long leather coat and wraparound sunglasses, and his jeans were slightly flared. He opened the back door and got in. I smelled his aftershave, a sweet, heavy musk. The lenses of his glasses were reflective and when I looked at him I could see a small, distended image of myself. I found it disconcerting.

‘Larry Nimble,' Bobby said. ‘This here's Dr Lomax. Jerry.'

Larry Nimble made a slight downward gesture of his head, a terse acknowledgment. His skin was as pallid as that of a man who'd spent his life in the dim fluorescence of pool-halls.