North of Montana (24 page)

I think about it.

“Then where did she get the drugs?”

He shrugs. “She must have a street connection somewhere.”

I nod. It’s a good guess, an educated guess you might say. But if Randall Eberhardt weren’t supplying Jayne Mason with narcotics, why is she going after the doctor now, as if her life depends on it?

•  •  •

To the west a gray mist has blended the ocean with the sky, creating a curtain of fog. The surf looks mild and green in the late afternoon light, playful, benign. Bicycle wheels spinning along the bike path, tiny as gears in a watch, throw off faint metallic sparks of light.

“Are you still seeing Claire?”

“It ended a couple of months ago when she decided she was still in love with Randall. No surprise. She could never let go, she clings to him like a life raft.”

“How did it end between you two?”

He rubs a knuckle across his short hair.

“Pretty bad. She was at my place, late getting home, she calls Teddy Feign’s because Laura was over there playing with their little girl.…” He sighs. “And she finds out over the phone that Laura’s fallen into the pool and almost bought the farm.”

I’ve put the pen down and stopped taking notes. My heart is beating faster because I know from his dread tone of voice—and because I shouldn’t be here in Claire Eberhardt’s place, feeling what she must have been feeling sitting across from this hunk Warren Speca—that we are about to make an abrupt turn onto a dangerous track.

“We jump into my truck and race over to Teddy’s house. Claire’s saying the Our Father all the way. Teddy wasn’t home at the time. The housekeepers already called 911 and the street was jammed with paramedics and cop cars. You don’t want to ever come home to that. Claire gets out of the truck and almost faints into the arms of this black woman cop. I don’t go into the house—what am I doing there, right?—but Claire comes back out to tell me Laura’s all right, she never even lost consciousness. Turns out it was the housekeeper’s fault.”

“Which housekeeper?”

“I forget her name.”

“Was it Violeta?”

“Yeah. Violeta.”

I feel a dull thud in the chest, the way you do when you hear something bad about someone you have come to like.

“Did you know Violeta?”

“Uh-uh. I think I ran into her once, when I showed up at Claire’s.”

“When was that?”

“One time toward the end. We didn’t see each other for a month after the thing with Laura, then Claire told me it was over.”

“Why? Guilty conscience?”

“Yeah, she thought it was all her fault, but also she claimed going through it with Randall brought them together.” He makes a wry sideways frown. “What can I tell you? The thrill was gone.”

He flicks the empty glass forward with thumb and forefinger.

“This is the first place I took her when we started being together.”

We wait for the elevator in front of a large antique mirror in a wooden frame painted with roses. Warren Speca has put on a baseball cap that says Warner Bros. Studios. I look at us in the mirror. The bartender is slipping a pot of chili into the steam tray in preparation for happy hour. The elevator arrives, empty. We step inside.

“The first time we kissed was right here.”

We stand in silence as the capsule shimmies and starts its descent, the way they stood, close together, awkward and lusting.

If he surprised me with a kiss the way he first kissed Claire Eberhardt, I know it would be just a brush, a tease, nothing you could take offense about, the way it was for her: a token from an old friend, remembrance of the days in high school when they weren’t afraid of what they didn’t know, when they rushed headlong into it all—a summer night in a moving car and all the windows down, intoxicated by the syrupy vapor of Southern Comfort and the jumbled weedy smells of a pitch-dark country road. The headlights off, blind, picking up speed.

SIXTEEN

THE NEXT DAY I get some disturbing information from Boston.

“Bay Pharmacy searched their records back to 1985 and the only prescriptions filled by Claudia Van Hoven were for an eye infection and some female problems,” Wild Bill says casually over the phone. “Even so they weren’t written by Randall Eberhardt.”

“Maybe she went to another drugstore and didn’t remember the name right.”

“I‘m checking into that now, little señorita.”

Suddenly I’m not buying Wild Bill’s jocularity. The breathless quality of his voice betrays fear, which is instantly communicated to me in a rush of adrenaline.

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

“Not by a long shot.”

“Yes, we are.” The panic mounts quickly. “She was lying to us out there in the park.”

“Now that doesn’t make any sense at all.” The more he tries to be reassuring, the more I know the ship is sinking fast. “Why would she make up something like that?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, but we’ve got to find some other substantiation to her claim that Eberhardt overprescribed. Otherwise we have no corroborating witness.”

“I hear what you’re telling me.”

“Did you pull her hospital records?”

“Haven’t had a moment—”

“I’ll do it,” I say abruptly, cutting him off with the touch of a button.

Four minutes later I am talking to Dr. Narayan, Randall Eberhardt’s former boss at New England Deaconess Hospital. He says he will pull Van Hoven’s chart by the afternoon and his lovely measured English accent is filled with promise. In my experience even the most educated people find it a turn-on to ride posse with the FBI.

The Bureau requires us to pass physical fitness tests every six months and you get three hours a week built into your schedule for exercise, so it isn’t goofing off for me to walk across the parking lot to the Westwood Community Recreation Center on Sepulveda and do a twenty-two-minute mile in the public pool. I am so wired there is nothing else but to hurtle myself down a tunnel of water as fast as I can, focusing on the big cross on the opposite wall, taking pleasure in the neat flip turn and the rhythm of the push-off and the glide and the power that comes from those abdominals I’ve been crunching every night; today I have power to spare and even welcome the challenge of the lady in the orange bathing suit paddling down the center of the fast lane, which adds another 10 percent of effort to the workout.

I return to the office with wet hair and all cylinders firing smoothly. After a good swim I am loose enough to cope with anything, which is fortunate because Rosalind has a message waiting for me to call Dr. Narayan in Boston.

“Claudia Van Hoven was treated here for fractures and trauma sustained in an automobile accident,” the doctor tells me enthusiastically. “Before that she had a long history of psychiatric treatment for all sorts of illness from depression to schizophrenia until finally she was hospitalized at Ridgeview Institute in Georgia and accurately diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, which we used to call multiple personality disorder.”

“Hold it. You’re telling me she’s one of those people who takes on different voices and personalities?”

“Right.”

“Isn’t that kind of far out?”

“Dissociative identity disorder is probably more common than you realize. It’s a mechanism for the psyche to avoid trauma by literally becoming another person. In Ms. Van Hoven’s case it seems to have begun in early adolescence, stemming from sexual abuse by a neighbor. From the looks of this record,” he goes on, “twenty-three separate personalities have been documented in the patient, including an aggressive male named Allan.”

“She said Allan was her helper.”

“Yes, some patients refer to certain alters as ‘helpers’—that is, helping personalities. Did you notice any switching when you talked to her?”

“Switching?”

“Did you actually see her become somebody else through a change in voice pattern or physical attitude—”

“Jesus, no.” A chill goes through me.

“Interesting.”

Struggling to get back to understandable reality, “Can we believe what she told us about Dr. Eberhardt?”

“That would be tricky.”

“But she seemed totally rational. She was intelligent and shy—said she played the violin.”

“That was probably her personality named Becky.”

“Becky!
What is this—the Twilight Zone? Look, she had a husband and a baby. She was wheeling a stroller.”

“Did you actually see the baby?”

“No. But it was starting to rain,” as if that explains anything.

Dr. Narayan’s tone is gentle. “I’m sorry to tell you that I doubt very much if there even was a baby in that carriage.”

The idea that she was out there in the cold pretending to be taking care of a baby—and that I bought it—leaves me awed. Finally:

“In your professional opinion, given her condition, is there any way Claudia Van Hoven could make a credible witness in a court of law?”

“Ultimately? Not a chance.”

I hang up the phone and take my head in my hands, hoping to crush my temples together into an unrecognizable mass. The sleeves and chest of the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise hanging on the coatrack nearby are puffed out and stiff as if filled with expanding hot air.

I have no corroborating witness.

And Galloway is expecting results tomorrow.

I could whine to my boss that I had been guaranteed the Van Hoven gal was good, but that the old drunk in Boston screwed up by not checking her out. As angry as I am right now, I can’t bring myself to give up Wild Bill. A letter of censure would only jeopardize his retirement and besides it would not solve my problem, which is to present hard evidence of Randall Eberhardt’s guilt.

For a long time I sit there with my mind scrambling like a rat inside a wall pawing with needle nails. I make notes, I make charts, but I can’t see how to make a case against the doctor. All we have is an actress’s unconfirmed story. Then the phone rings and it is Jayne Mason herself.

She is the last person I want to talk to. I’m not interested in helicopters flying over her property, or maybe this time it’s a late garbage collection she wants me to fix.

Surprisingly, she is totally contrite. She needs to talk to me but doesn’t want to go into it further on the telephone, may we meet?

Since, the last time, it took about a month to arrange a meeting and then she showed up a week early and at a completely different location, I am somewhat grouchy and suspicious of the entire venture, but she promises her car will pick me up in front of the Federal Building at 4:45 that afternoon, and it does.

•  •  •

It quickens the heartbeat to walk past the crowd to a shiny black limousine waiting just for me. Heads turn. I feel giddy and a dufus grin has plastered itself across my face.

Tom Pauley opens the door with a knowing nod. It’s not like climbing into a car, it’s like entering a room, a room that smells of lipstick and fine leather, with pearly white panels of light glowing around the edges, a chrome shelf holding crystal decanters with silver tags around their necks—Whiskey, Rye, Gin. I can stretch out my legs and still be miles away from the state-of-the-art console with built-in TV, VCR, CD player, and tape deck, above which a sheet of dark glass separates us from the driver. There are two telephones, a fax, and even a clip-on holder for what looks like a long test tube that holds one yellow rose. As we leave the curb a row of glasses tinkles against a mirrored backlight and a pile of scripts slides across a miniature kilim rug, spreading itself out like a fan.

“Thank you for coming, Ana, dear.”

Jayne Mason, fully made up with Parisian red lips and dark shadowed eyes, hair pinned up in a twist, briefly puts her hand on mine, then turns back toward the window with a pensive stare. She is wearing hot pink silky trousers with white heels and a hot pink silk T-shirt underneath a white blazer with the sleeves pushed up. There is a multitude of gold bangles on each wrist and around her neck a pearl choker with some sort of sparkly thing hanging off (it’s hard to see in the soft light). She looks like she means business, in a Palm Springs sort of way. Sitting so close I can catch her body scent—like a lingerie drawer spiced by a clove sachet.

It is easy to picture how Randall Eberhardt was drawn into this sultry female womb, accompanying Miss Mason to exclusive fundraiser dinners, wheeling around town in a private bubble, protected by one-way tinted glass. As I observe a group of office workers waiting for a light to change on Wilshire Boulevard, I realize that the ability to see people when they can’t see you is usually reserved for us law enforcement types; what a thrill it must have been for the doctor to share the privilege.

Then Jayne Mason begins to sing. Her head is still turned away from me and the voice is musing and low, as if I weren’t there:

“In the wee small hours of the morning / While the whole wide world is fast asleep …”

So this is what all the attention and fussing is about, why people put up with the silliness and the excess, why Magda Stockman has chosen to place her body between Jayne Mason and the rest of the world, why someone like my grandfather could actually be moved by a performance: this gift.