Deadline (27 page)

10.30 p.m.

I drove about a quarter mile, perhaps more, I wasn't sure. I parked outside an all-night convenience store, where a bunch of young people milled around the payphones. The kids wore long, baggy shorts or jeans that were too big and hung slackly from hips. Drug deals were being made, surreptitious encounters, bindles and tiny bottles passed from hand to hand. The city had become totally alien to me; it existed on levels I couldn't map and each level was darker than the one before. It was a place of strange designs, crazed schemes, contradictions.

And clocks. Weird clocks. Time running out too fast. Everything speeding away from me. The universe emptying.

I held the cellphone to my ear. I listened to the buzz of the number I was calling. I expected an answering-machine, because it was late. My chest was tight. I had a series of strange rainbow flickers, shimmering things in my visual field that were the harbingers of migraine.

I didn't look at the box, although I was conscious of the torn silver wrapping-paper lying on the floor on the passenger side. It caught the light and gleamed. The blood on my fingers was black, or a red so deep it had no name. Out of nowhere, I remembered a game we played in Buffalo as kids, ringing doorbells and running away laughing, fleeing the anger of some householder. I felt like the guy who'd opened his door because he'd heard the bell, only he'd found nobody on the doorstep; he was baffled, irritated by his own bewilderment, and the night was alive with secrets –

‘Yeah?' The voice on the line was sleepy.

I said, ‘Marv? This is Jerry Lomax.'

‘Jerry? What time is it? Is something wrong?'

‘I think something's really wrong, Marv.'

I glanced at the shape on the passenger seat now, this stunted, lifeless creature denied a world. I felt panic and sadness and anxiety and my brain chugging like one of those old steam engines my father had driven. The contents of the silver-wrapped box – like Consuela, like Harry, another stake driven into me. Another turn of the screw, this one an almighty twist.

‘Talk to me,' Marv said. ‘I'm listening.'

‘Sondra's miscarried, Marv. She's miscarried.' I didn't know how many times I said the words, nor how many times Marv Sweetzer said,
Now wait, now wait.

Hard pressure lay just behind my eyes. The bloody thing on the seat. The box. The silver wrapping-paper. Miscarried. Wrapped up, delivered to me by somebody driving a Pontiac. Sick fucks. Did they abort her deliberately? Did they force her? Or had she miscarried because of stress or fear? I didn't know.

Did it matter how?

My sadness was for her. More for her than for me. And for this child, and that small town I'd imagined, where he or she might have grown up, where the air smelt of woodsmoke on fall afternoons.

I heard myself say, ‘She may be ill, Marv. She may be in need of hospitalization. It's been years since I interned, I don't remember the procedures, what we're supposed to do in a situation like this. I only delivered one kid in my life, I never dealt with a miscarriage before.'

‘Jerry. Listen to me. Run this past me again. From the beginning. Take your time.'

I repeated myself.

Sondra's lost the baby. The fetus. Sondra's aborted the fetus. I didn't know how much blood she'd lost. Was she ill? Was her life in danger? What was I supposed to do?

‘Sondra's miscarried, you say.' Sweetzer had a rich baritone voice. Women liked it. It comforted and reassured them. They trusted themselves to Marv.

Comfort and reassure me too, Marv. The way you comfort your female patients. I need you now.

‘She's lost the fucking
baby
, Marv,' I said.

Marv Sweetzer was silent a moment before he said, ‘If I didn't know you better, Jerry, I'd say you'd been dabbling in those psycho-drugs you hand out to people.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

‘This fetus. This baby. I must have missed something, Jerry. How the Sam Hill is it possible for Sondra to lose a baby if she isn't pregnant?'

‘Isn't – What the
fuck
are you talking about, Marv?'

‘Quit cussing at me, Jerry. I hate cussing. I'm telling you what I know. She was in my office last Monday and she wasn't pregnant then, so how could she be pregnant now? How is that possible?'

It was a damn good question. I shifted the position of my hand on the phone. I was sticking to plastic. Oozing sweat. ‘She isn't … wasn't pregnant. Is that what you're saying to me?'

‘I'd bet my reputation on it.'

‘Dear God,' I said.

‘She'd love to be pregnant, Jerry. But she just isn't. I'm worried about you.'

I cut the connection. I got out of the car.

If I sucked down some bad air, filled my lungs with gunk, walked up and down with my hands rattling coins in my pockets, maybe everything would return to normal, or whatever passed for normal now. Then I'd get back inside the car, and there wouldn't be blood and sodden tissue paper and a small, damp cardboard box on the passenger seat.

Sondra hadn't been pregnant.

She'd been
unpregnant.

I went inside the store, blinked in the searing totality of fluorescence, that most unnatural of lights. I bought an
LA Times.
The clerk didn't react to the bloodstains on my hands and face. He was maybe only nineteen and he'd seen everything. A couple of young kids jostled me just for the sport of it, a teenage assertion of self and power. I sidestepped them, walked back to the car, opened the newspaper.

I scooped the soft remains of the half-formed thing back inside the box, then placed the box inside the open newspaper. I folded the paper over.

I got out of the car again and walked to the dumpster at the side of the store. I tossed the package in. I heard it fall, heard it strike bottles and make them clink. The day that had begun with a sense of new life in the making had ended in a night where death was everywhere.

Sondra wasn't pregnant.
Why did you tell me otherwise, my love? Why did you do that?
I listened to the roar of the store's air-conditioning unit, watched the kids work the payphones, saw two airplanes float out of the night sky as they drifted down towards LAX. For a second, I expected a collision. But none came.

Dreams were only dreams. Mine hadn't been prophetic. I'd predicted nothing.

I'd been blind, even in sleep.

I returned to the car.

The interior smelled of metal and plastic and wet leather, and something that would turn foul eventually, like old meat or spilled milk, or the world we lived in, overflowing with the sorry treacheries we committed almost daily.

10.43 p.m.

I drove through the canyons with the windows of the car rolled down and warm night air circulating. The road behind me was empty. Dense foliage loomed up on either side: an illusion of rustic life. I needed the comfort of illusion. I longed for simplicity, no more elaboration.

My cellphone rang. I picked it up, listened.

‘I'm sorry about the unpleasant nature of the delivery.'

‘Fuck you to hell,' I said. ‘Let's just get this over with. I want to get on with my goddam life.'

‘I know, I know,' and his voice was grave, considerate. ‘If it's any consolation, your wife's OK. She's weak, sure, but she'll be back on her feet soon enough. Nice to think she'll recuperate at home with you. She's going to need a lot of TLC, Lomax. It's a tough break – losing a baby.'

‘It's tough all right,' I said.

So he didn't know I'd contacted Marv Sweetzer. His intelligence system had let him down. He was under the impression that I believed Sondra had miscarried, which was what he wanted. All day long, he'd been building a little universe for me, and he'd directed the events that had taken place in it, but this one time his concentration had lapsed. He hadn't taken into consideration the possibility that I'd call Sweetzer.

I wondered where they'd gone for the unborn child, how they'd acquired it. I guessed it wasn't difficult if you had the cash or the brute force. And people like Resick and Gerson had plenty of both.

I thought of Sondra's terrible perjury. The why of it. But I didn't want to follow this line of inquiry through, because I didn't like where it was leading. I remembered making love to her on the deck of our house, and how she'd said,
I'm not glass, Jerry. I won't break.
How conscious I'd been of the baby inside her, and my fear of causing distress or damage.

It was the worst lie she could have invented. She knew how hard we'd tried to have a child, and I couldn't believe she'd use that great
yearning
against me.

No, no, I didn't want to think she'd lied.

I needed to believe she'd been forced into this situation.

I conjured connections, delicate as a pattern in old lace: Nardini bought Gerson and, incidentally, Sondra out of a cocaine bust; and then Gerson introduced Sondra to Nardini, because she was the wife of Emily Ford's psychiatrist. And Nardini had to stop Emily's ascent to power by whatever means, since she was a menace to the people whose interests he protected and represented: the corporate scam artists who made dirty money clean again, or who hid fortunes in unassailable bank-accounts in countries the size of Rhode Island and evaded taxation; the pushers of merchandise – whether useless swamp with allegedly great investment potential in Costa Rica, or cocaine from Medellin, there was always,
always
a buyer; smooth, hard men who rigged juries, bought judges, and lived where the law couldn't touch them; and then down a few levels from the hushed boardrooms and private dining-rooms and fancy cufflinks and Hugo Boss suits were the gophers, the guys with dirty hands, swindlers, con-men, pimps, hookers, and killers – the tiny wheels that made the big wheels turn.

What the hell was the hold they had over Sondra? What obliged her to go along with them? It
had
to be more than just a cocaine bust. Surely Sondra would have told me about that, rather than participate in an elaborate charade, a cruelty involving a fake kidnapping, and dubious phone calls that required her to act as if she were in pain or drugged.

I preferred this kind of reasoning to the notion that she'd perpetrated an enormous falsehood. In my version, she was no liar: she was a victim. She hadn't deceived me. She was the instrument of other people's deceptions. I could live with this explanation, even if a shadow at the back of my mind troubled me. But I didn't want to think about that. It wasn't the time for doubt. Faith was what I required.

I loved Sondra. I wanted her.

‘Are you still there, Lomax?'

‘I'm here.'

‘Dole tell you anything of interest?'

‘We didn't have time to talk before your people showed up.'

‘I heard about that,' he said. ‘I'm impressed. You can take the boy out of Buffalo, but you can't take Buffalo, et cetera.'

‘That's right,' I said.

Between trees, I had a view of the city way below; it filled the valley, a vast expanse of lights and lives. I checked a street sign. I was on Grierson Drive. I was looking for 3245.

‘So, Jerry, are you ready to play the last card? We're well past the deadline, and my people are becoming impatient.'

‘I'm ready,' I said.

‘I'm going to give you very specific instructions. Follow them to the letter. To the letter: let me underline that.'

‘What about Sondra?'

‘She'll be returned to you, Jerry.'

‘Isn't she bleeding?' How easily I played this game of prevarication.

‘Not now.'

‘Did you call a physician?'

‘I told you. She isn't bleeding any more.'

‘The blood just stopped on its own, is that it?' I asked.

‘What is this, Jerry? All you need to know is that she'll be given back to you when we make the switch.'

‘Just make sure you move her carefully.'

‘Wrapped in cotton, I assure you.'

‘Use plenty of it,' I said.

‘There's a payphone across the street from Book Soup on Sunset. You know the place?'

‘I've been there,' I said.

‘Go to the payphone. Wait five minutes. Then call this number. 545 6098. You want to write that down?'

‘I'll remember it,' I said.

‘Say it back to me, Jerry.'

I did so.

‘A man will answer. He'll give you an address in the neighborhood. You'll go there. When you get to this destination, you'll learn more.'

I looked from the window again.
3245.
I drove straight past, and parked about a hundred yards down the street.

‘OK,' I said. ‘The payphone first.'

‘Go easy, Jerry,' he said.

I killed the ringer on my phone, stuck the phone in my pocket, got out of the car. There were no other pedestrians. I reached the driveway, which was about two hundred yards long and lined with soft lamps and eucalyptus trees, the leaves of which caught the light in such a way that they resembled misshapen antique coins. At the end of the drive, the house was perched, a little precariously, on a promontory that overlooked the city. It was one of those hyper-modern homes, a layered, angular affair on steel stilts. The windows were oval, and lit, creating an impression, in the dark, of cats' eyes.

An unwelcoming place, and I didn't want to go near it. I imagined tripping a sensor, setting off an alarm, bright lights, sirens. I had no way of knowing what security there might be here. Plenty of it, I was sure. Everybody in this city lived in fear of violence and home invasion. It was a mind-set: lock up your possessions, protect them with guns and alarms.

I stepped onto the driveway, noticing that the high, wrought-iron gates had been left open. I thought this an odd oversight, but I didn't pause to analyze it. I took a few paces along the drive before I realized that I was exposed to anyone watching from the house.