She handed me the book, and I read out loud:
'Mad as a hatter, dry as a bone, red as a beet, and blind as a stone.'
'Dry mouth and flushing,' I said. 'Parasympathetic effects.'
'Yes! And when I read it, I remembered the day Jamey got all agitated in group. And the other times I saw him freaking out. Alex, during each episode, he was highly flushed). Red as a beet! Breathing hard! I'm sure I mentioned it.'
'You did.' And so had Sarita Flowers. And Dwight Cadmus, describing the night Jamey had torn apart his library. I concentrated and reeled in the exact words: red and puffy and breathing hard.
Looking at the books she'd collected, I asked:
'Anything there on drug interactions?'
She extracted a thick red volume and handed it to me.
I turned to the section on anti-Parkinsonian drugs and scanned it. The warning to physicians was midway through the paragraph on counterindications and had been placed in a black-bordered rectangle:
Anticholinergics were potentiated by Thorazine.
Administration of most of the standard antipsychotic transquillisers could prove harmful, even fatal, to Parkinson's patients and others who'd been given atropine or one of its derivatives, scrambling the nervous system and creating intense deleria and pseudomadness. Pseudosenility.
That set the minnow free and allowed me to net it: The throwaway I'd picked up that first night in the lobby of the hospital - The Canyon Oaks Quarterly - had featured an article on anticholinergic syndrome in the elderly, the misdiagnosis of senility caused by drug-induced psychosis
If Jamey had indeed been poisoned with belladonna derivatives, the drug Mainwaring had pumped into him in the name of treatment had plunged him into a man-made hell. The evil doctor scenario was looking better and better.
I put the book down and tried to look calm.
'This is it, isn't it?' said Jennifer.
'It fits,' I said, 'but you'd need brugmansia clones to pull it off. Where would you get hold of something like that?'
'From someone who'd been to the jungle,' she said, 'before they bulldozed through it. A botanist or explorer.'
I picked up the Stanford monograph and scanned it. At the end of the text were several pages of photographs. One of them caught my eye.
It was a stone carving, an idol used in a hallucinogenic burial rite. I looked at it more closely: a squatting toad with the face of a slit-eyed human, a plumed helmet atop the rough-hewn head. Crude yet strangely powerful.
I'd seen one just like it not too long ago.
Turning quickly to the front of the monograph, I read the names of the authors: Andrew J. McAllister, Ronald D. Levine, Heather J. Palmer.
Heather J. Palmer. A name out of a newspaper clipping. A June wedding in Palo Alto. The bride's mother was a stalwart of the DAR. Her late father, the diplomat, had served in Colombia, Brazil, and Panama, where the bride had been born.
The future Mrs. Dwight Cadmus had done field work after all.
'THE AUNT,' said Milo. 'Jesus. This case is a goddamn cancer. Every time you turn around, it's spread somewhere else.'
He warmed his hands on the coffee mug, took a bite of bagel, and went back to reading the McAllister monograph.
The rains had started late in the afternoon, gathering strength with ferocious haste, courtesy of a tropical storm blown inland. The last time it had come down this hard, the canyons had turned to fudge sauce and a healthy chunk of Malibu had been washed into the ocean. Despite its outward frailty - perched flamingo-like on stilts and canti-levering improbably over the hillside - my house had withstood all previous onslaughts. But that didn't stop me from stockpiling sandbags and fantasising about arks as each new sheet of water slapped against the redwood siding. Outside, the glen seemed to be melting, and I was shot through with melancholy and that special California sense of transience.
Lightning splintered the sky, and thunder applauded. Milo read while I fidgeted.
'This brugmansia is a nasty shit,' he said, peering at the pages. 'Any number of ways to hit someone with it - tea, soup, food, cigarettes.'
'Some preparations can be absorbed through the skin,' I said. 'There's a section later on about poultices.'
'Wonderful. And Auntie's an expert on it.' He frowned and slapped his hand on the table hard enough for the mug to dance. 'Paying a quack to blitz a kid's mind. Very cold. Do you think at some level he understood what was going on? All that talk about zombies?'
'God only knows.'
'Jesus, Alex, I hate family stuff. Pure shit, and the richer the family, the worse it smells. At least the poor folk do it honestly - get pissed at each other, grab the Remington off the rack, and blast away. These upper-crust assholes don't even have the guts to act out their own passions. Probably delegate their bowel movements. "Grimes, take a shit, please. " "Yes, madam. " ' He shook his head and took a long swallow of coffee.
'Besides lacking sublety,' I said, 'blasting away with the Remington gets you caught.'
He looked up.
'Yeah, I know. There's still no solid evidence. Rub it in.'
'They looked everywhere for the book?'
'No,' he growled. 'We used volunteers from the Braille Institute, let them tap around the deck for a coupla minutes with their little white canes, and called it a day. What do you think?'
'Excuse me, Sergeant.'
'Hmmph,' he mumbled, and returned to the book, humming off key: 'Rainy days and Mondays always bring me down.'
'It's Thursday.'
'Whatever.'
I went into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. Sitting on the window ledge and drinking, I waited for a
lull in the downpour. When none came, I put on my raincoat anyway, stuck an old cowboy hat on my head, and went down to the garden to check the koi.
The gravel around the pond had loosened, and the azaleas drooped defeatedly. But the water level was a good six inches from overflowing, and the fish seemed to be enjoying themselves, careening playfully in the turbulence, pecking at the rain-packed surface of the water, creating kinetic rainbows that sparkled through the gloom. When they saw me, they raced forward and slurped at the moss rock, bumping and grinding in a frenzy of fat, wet polychrome bodies. I took some pellets out of the feed canister and tossed them in.
'Bon appetit, fellows.' I crossed the garden to take a look under the house: muddy but intact, just a bit of erosion. Some of the sandbags had got wet.
I dragged them out of the rain and had started to stack them when I heard Milo call:
'Phone, Alex.'
After scraping my shoes off, I climbed back up to the terrace. He was holding the receiver with one hand, the monograph with the other.
'Some guy who claims he's your broker. Very fast talker.'
I took the phone.
'Hello, Alex? Lou. Anything you want to tell me about the Bitter Canyon bonds, yet?'
I glanced over at Milo. He sat hunched, chin in hand, immersed in a chapter on rites and spells.
'Not yet. Give me a couple - '
'No sweat, Alex. I already unloaded it. After we spoke, I went digging and found a slight trickle oozing out of Beverly Hills. No big block sales, just a few odd lots here and there, but there's definitely been some quiet selling. Might mean nothing, but then again, it might. In any event, I'm out.'
'Lou, I -'
'Don't worry, Alex. I sold at a good premium and made a tasty short-term capital gain. My clients are pleased, and
my charisma remains unscathed. If it crashes, I'll look like Nicodemus; if not, we still did okay. So thank you, Doctor.'
'For what?'
'Information. I know you couldn't say anything, but nuance was enough. The market runs on it.'
'If you say so. Glad to help.'
'Listen, I'm fuelling up The Incentive and heading down your way en route to Cabo San Lucas. Going to be looking for white sea bass and the late albacore run, plus there's a rumour the tutuava have returned. I'll be docked at Marina Del Rey for a couple of days, tying up some loose ends with a client. How about I call you and we take lunch?'
'Sure, Lou,' I said absently. 'That would be great. Listen, can I ask you a technical question - '
'That's what I'm here for.'
'Not about finance. About boats.'
Milo stopped reading.
'If you're looking to buy, I know someone who's got a very clean thirty-foot Boston whaler. Probate situation - '
'Not in the market,' I said, then looked out at the downpour. 'Yet.'
'What then?'
'Lou, if you wanted to hide something on a boat, where would you put it?'
' Depends on the boat. The Incentive's got all sorts of nooks and crannies, all that teak. If there's enough woodwork, you could hollow out a compartment virtually anywhere.'
'No, I mean so even the pros couldn't find it.'
'The pros?'
'The police.'
Milo looked up and stared at me.
'Alex,' said Cestare, 'what the devil are you up to?'
'I'm not up to anything. Consider it a theoretical question.'
He gave a low whistle.
'In some circuitous way this is related to Bitter Canyon, isn't it?'
'It could be.'
Silence.
'How big a thing are you trying to hide?'
'Say, five inches by eight.'
'How thick?'
'An inch.'
'That small, huh? For a minute you had me worried you were getting into something felonious. Cocaine transport, et cetera. But even coke wouldn't be worth smuggling in such a small quantity . . . unless, of course, it were a private stash and you - '
'Lou,' I said patiently, 'I'm not a dope smuggler. Now where would you hide - '
'A five-by-eight-by-one thing? Let's see, have you tried the sea strainer?'
'What's that?'
'In a motorised boat - we are talking about a stinkpot, aren't we?'
I held my hand over the speaker and asked Milo:
'Radovic's boat motorised?'
He nodded.
'Yes.'
'In a motorised boat, seawater is used to keep the engine cool. The sea strainer is basically a duct that runs through the boat, carrying the water to the engine and keeping it free of debris. You've got hatches on both ends. If I really didn't want something to be found, I'd use the one in the hull. You'd have to swim underwater to stash it. Is this thing perishable?'
'Yes.'
'Can you use it in the kitchen? Animal, vegetable, mineral?'
I laughed.
'Anyway,' he said, 'I'd wrap it in something to protect it, unscrew the strainer hatch, stick the thing in, close it up, and forget about it. Sound like what you're after?'
'Could be. Thanks, Lou.'
'Think nothing of it. We're a full-service brokerage house. Oh, one more thing, Alex.'
'What's that?'
'Brandon says hello. You've convinced him he's an executive.'
'Hello back to Brandon.'
I hung up. Milo stood over me.
'So?' he said.
'Do you know a good frogman?'
The wind came in hard, cold gusts separated by ominous moments of frigid silence. The strongest blasts bent the masts of the smaller sailboats, causing them to whipsaw and dance. The air was a gumbo of bilge, gasoline, and sweet coastal air, lightly salted.
'This is supposed to blow over by evening,' said Milo, drawing his yellow slicker tight and hugging himself. His pale face had pinkened in the chill, and his eyes were red and watery. The slicker made him look like a big school kid. 'We can wait. You don't have to do it now.'
The man in the wet suit looked out at the marina. Cinder skies had turned the water a deep, angry grey. Grey flecked with frothy white. Shark-fin waves threw off mottled highlights of pea green as they climbed, peaked, and rolled to sudden collapse. The man watched it for a while, white-lashed eyes compressed to a squint, young, freckled face stolid and still.
'S'okay, Sarge,' he said. 'I've seen worse.' He
rubbed
his
hands
together,
checked
his
tanks, inspected the tool bag hanging from his weight bag, and stepped
to
the
flimsy
aluminium
rail.
Another
diver climbed out of the cabin and flippered over. His face was equally young: shelf-chin, grey eyes, pug of a nose. 'Ready, Steve?' he asked. The first man grinned and said, 'Let's do it.' They pushed their masks down, climbed over the rail, held on, and curled their bodies, as sleek and black as bull seals. Without a word they went over, piercing the skin of the water and disappearing.
'Pacific Division rookies,' said Milo. 'Macho surfers.' We were standing on the bow of Radovic's boat,
a fifteen-year-old Chris Craft labelled Sweet Vengeance in chipped gilt script, its fibreglass dull and scarred, its sloping deck caked with fish scales, grime, and black algae and badly in need of repair. The deck fixtures had been dismantled. Some hadn't been replaced. A fisherman's chair lay on its side. Several bolts had rolled into a comer. A rotting ribbon of kelp floated in a deepening pool of muddy water.
The door to the cabin had been left open, revealing a cramped interior made claustrophobic by jumbled clots of clothing and stacks of cartons. The boat had been taken apart.
'Looks as if the Braille people were thorough,' I said.
'Oh, yeah,' said Milo. 'Dogs and all.' He pulled out a handkerchief, blew his nose, and looked down at the water. Suddenly a face slap of wind whipped up the waves, and the boat lurched. Both of us grabbed the rail for support. The deck was slimy-slick, and I had to struggle to keep standing. Milo's feet slid out from under him, and his knees gave way. A fall looked inevitable, but he stiffened, put his weight on his heels, and fought to remain upright. When the wind died down, he was swearing and his face had started to turn green.
'Terra firma,' he said weakly. 'Before I heave my chowder.'
We walked off the boat gingerly and waited on the dock, wet but stable. Milo breathed deeply and stared out at the angry harbour. Forty-foot craft bobbled like bathtub toys. His complexion remained pallid, tinted with olive.