To the Bone (12 page)

Josh lowered his eyes, then shook his head again.

“Where'd she get it, then? Do you know?”

He did not answer. His fingers twisted each other anxiously.

“I'll be real straight with you,” Larrabee said. “When the police get in on this, the first thing they're going to look for is whether she was blackmailing somebody.”

“No!” Josh looked up, starting to go teary-eyed. “She wasn't like that at all.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Eden was sweet, she really was,” Josh said, suddenly defensive. “But she believed what she wanted to. Ray latched onto her when she was still in high school. She was the prom queen, and he came on like this big photographer, who was going to make her career. After that, she couldn't get away from him. He talked her into things, like those movies, but just loser things. She never would have done anything really
wrong
.”

Monks hoped it was true, and allowed himself to feel a little better. If this was, in fact, the end of his career, maybe it had not been wasted on a hardhearted gold digger.

“But something was going on with her, huh?” Larrabee said. “Come on, you knew her better than anybody else. Suppose somebody did hurt her. You'd want to help us find out who, right?”

Josh squirmed in his seat. “She made me promise to keep it secret.”

“It doesn't matter to her now, Josh. Sorry to put it like that, but it's true.”

Finally, he seemed to make up his mind. He glanced somewhat theatrically to both sides, then leaned forward and said in a confidential whisper: “It was the man she went to San Francisco to be with.”

“Could you be a little more specific?”

“Her plastic surgeon. Dr. D'Anton.”

Larrabee, to his credit, kept driving smoothly, but Monks swiveled in his seat. Josh shrank back, looking a little frightened at his intensity.

“Eden was having an affair with Dr. D'Anton?” Monks said. “Are you positive, Josh?” As he spoke, he remembered her discharge form from the clinic, with method of payment marked: CASH.

“Oh, it was more than an affair. He was making her beautiful.” Josh sounded dreamy now—maybe seeing himself in her place. “It wasn't just a fantasy. He had the power to really do it. And then, she was going to be
somebody
.”

The air-conditioning was on in the car, but Monks rolled his window down anyway. The fresh air, hot and gummy though it was, felt good sweeping across his face. He was starting to want a drink.

T
hey got back to San Francisco about five
P.M.
Monks picked up the Bronco at Larrabee's office and started the drive home. The rush-hour traffic was thick, and he spent a slow twenty minutes on Highway 101, getting through the floodgate of vehicles pouring on and off the Richmond Bridge. Even the two-lane country roads past San Rafael toward the coast buzzed with manic tailgaters. With relief, he pulled into the dirt parking lot of his favorite place to shop.

It was one of the few old general stores left along the coast, with scarred wooden floors and the palpable aroma of decades of meat, fish, sausage, and cheese. It was bigger than you thought when you first walked in, with counters of dry goods at the back—jeans and wool shirts, boots, fishing and camping gear, first aid and automotive supplies—a basic selection of just about anything you might need to get by. It was cool and dark and quiet. The owners were an extended Portuguese family, the stumpy beret-wearing padron, his always-black-dressed wife, and a fluid collection of children, grandchildren, cousins, and nieces and nephews.

The wife was behind the counter when Monks walked in. She greeted him with eyes that seemed sad, even reproachful.

“Dr. Monk. You don't come see us no more.”

Monks realized guiltily that Martine had been doing most of the shopping for the past several months, and his usual twice-a-week visits had fallen off.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Lisbon. I've been terrifically busy. I'll do better, I promise.”

She nodded slightly, accepting the excuse, if not entirely satisfied.

By way of reparation, Monks bought more than he had intended to: a large salmon fillet, chunks of brie and Jarlsberg, a Genoa salami and a string of linguica, a loaf of fresh sourdough bread, the makings for an avocado salad. He threw in half a dozen bottles of Carmenet wine, mostly cabernets, but two of the sauvignon blanc that Martine favored, just in case.

And liquor. It was more expensive than at the chains, but early on in the twenty-some years that he had been coming here, he had understood that there was an importance to this sacrament that transcended money—an arcane link between him and a way of life that had a kind of profundity, a connection to the way things were on some essential ancient level, that was missing in his own.

As he was about to make his selection, the padron came in the rear door with his heavy stumping walk. He spent most of his time at his bocce court out back, working on his game, or socializing with friends, or just sitting. But he always seemed to appear for this part of the ritual, whether by radar or something as mundane as a buzzer system. His wife faded back at his approach.

“What today, Doctor? The usual?” His face was the color of saddle leather, deeply creased, sprouting a gray stubble of whiskers. He had the worst teeth Monks had ever seen. They were exposed by a knowing grin, an understanding between two men of the world.

“Better throw in a couple extra, Antonio,” Monks said.

“How many you want? Three, four?”

“Make it six or eight. Hell, make it a case.”

The old man's grin widened. His wife backed farther away, eyes anxious, lips moving slightly as if she were saying a rosary. Antonio's thick-fingered hands carefully placed bottles of Finlandia vodka into an empty carton.

“A little drink is good for a man,” he said. He said it every time.

Monks made the requisite response. “It keeps the blood flowing.”

He was back in the Bronco, just starting it up, when the store's front door opened and Antonio came huffing out, waving, with something in his hand. Monks realized it was a net sack of lemons.

“You almost forgot,” Antonio called.

The lemons were beautiful, fragrant and smooth-skinned, promising succulent juicy flesh inside: the perfect complement to the vodka.

“Christ, thanks, Antonio,” Monks said. He lifted up in the seat, reaching for his wallet.

“No, no,” the old man said, waving the money away. “On me.”

 

Stover Larrabee was in his office drinking a can of Pabst when the phone rang. The caller was a cop named Guido Franchi, who had been a rookie with Larrabee on the SFPD. Franchi was still on the force, a detective lieutenant now.

Leaving Sacramento, Larrabee had decided it was worth checking whether Dr. Welles D'Anton had ever had any involvement with the police. Like a lot of private investigators, Larrabee had an informal and not always legal arrangement of sharing information with several cops. He had left a message for Franchi, asking him the favor.

“What do you say, Deadeye?” Franchi said.

Larrabee smiled. The same incident that had gotten him thrown off the police force—shooting a mugger with a 9mm pistol, from roughly sixty yards, at night—had won him the respectful nickname from his colleagues.

“Thanks for calling, Guido.”

“How's the glossy life of the private dick?”

“No benefits or pension, that's how. You?”

“I'm retiring in three years and twenty-seven days,” Franchi said with conviction.

“Not so good, huh?”

“You wouldn't like it any better than you used to, let's put it that way. On top of all the other bullshit, there's too many young cops full of steroids and attitude.”

“I guess we were, too,” Larrabee said. “Attitude, at least.”

“Yeah?” Franchi said doubtfully. “I don't remember
liking
it so much. Anyway, what I got here, you never heard it from me, right? One thing I don't need right now is to piss off somebody like a big-time surgeon. I want these next three years to go real quiet.”

“Capisce.”

“Okay. D'Anton's name doesn't show up anywhere on the computers. I asked a few of the old-timers. Sergeant Tolliver remembered something, back about ninety-seven.”

“He would,” Larrabee said. Tolliver was a thirty-year veteran, a massive black desk sergeant who quietly ran things while the waves of politics swept and crashed all around him. His memory was legendary.

“I dug up the report,” Franchi said.

“I'm going to owe you some drinks, I can tell.”

“There's not much. Routine missing person, a young woman. No real connection to D'Anton, just a sideline. Still interested?”

Larrabee slid into his desk chair and reached for a pen. “Real interested,” he said.

 

Julia D'Anton awoke in the late afternoon. The window shades were drawn in her bedroom, to shield her from the westering sun. She was disoriented, groggy from a long nap, and from the Vicodin she had taken. She got up, put on a robe, and went to a window to see if anyone else was home.

The only other car in the drive was Gwen Bricknell's red Mercedes convertible. Gwen usually stayed at her own apartment in San Francisco, but tomorrow they were entertaining here, and there was a lot of preparing to do.

Julia walked outside, thinking that Gwen might be swimming. The house was in a secluded little valley in Marin, near the coast, an old family place that she and Welles had expanded into a luxury getaway. The swimming pool, filled from a spring that flowed from the mountainside above, had been crafted to look like a natural rocky grotto.

But there was no one in it. Julia turned back and went into the house, through the living room, and up the stairs to Gwen's pied-à-terre here. Julia knocked, and waited, hearing the rhythmic thump of music inside. This was Gwen's private place, securely locked when she was not here. Only cleaning maids and occasional lovers were allowed in, both under her strict supervision.

Gwen opened the door, flushed and sweating, drying her face with a towel. She was wearing a spandex outfit. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. A large-screen TV showed several shapely women, also spandex-clad, dancing in swift precise unison. Like Gwen's apartment in San Francisco, like every place she had lived, this one was fitted out with an exercise studio—Nautilus weight-lifting equipment, a NordicTrack, videos of aerobics and Mari Winsor workouts and bun busters. Most mornings she was up at five
A.M.
, putting in a fierce hour-long regimen before dressing to go to the clinic, with extra stints when she had time. She was just as careful with other aspects of her health. There were cabinets filled with vitamins, the finest skin-care products, estrogen and collagen cremes. She had tried them all, in all combinations, even getting ingredients directly from the clinic and mixing them herself.

Then there was the medicine that fueled her fierce energy—a plate with several lines of cocaine, waiting on a dresser.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Julia said.

“It's fine. I was just getting ready to shower.”

“I was wondering about tomorrow night. Whether Welles is coming.” D'Anton usually came to the parties here, dispensing Botox injections to his female guests.

But now, nothing was as usual.

“He'll make an appearance,” Gwen said. “He knows he can't let his adoring fans down.” She waited for further questions, her face politely inquiring—the same look she used on women at the clinic, to put them in their place.

Julia felt her anger stir but resisted the urge to rise to the bait. She turned to go, then asked, as if by afterthought, “Did that Dr. Monks stop by?”

“Yes. I showed him Eden's records. He seemed satisfied that everything was all right.”

“He's not going to be a nuisance, then?”

“I don't know about that,” Gwen said. She stepped back into the room and picked up the cocaine plate, offering it to Julia.

Julia waved it away. “What do you mean?”

Gwen bent over the plate and inhaled through a plastic straw, a long shuddering breath into each nostril. She came back up with eyes bright and intense.

“I got a phone call right before I left the clinic,” Gwen said. “Dr. Monks thinks Eden might have been murdered.”

T
his evening, Martine was not there when Monks got home. He knew it before he pulled up the driveway and saw the empty spot where she usually parked her car, before the edge of his vision caught the disappearing tail of the black cat, Cesare Borgia, no doubt plotting revenge against his truant humans.

But then, there was no reason she should be.

There was a single message on his answering machine. He had a feeling he knew who it was going to be, and he was right.

“Carroll!” Baird Necker's voice roared. “That girl's father called up screaming that you'd come by, talking about murder. Are you fucking crazy? If you pull anything else like that, I'll kill you with my own hands!”

Monks put away the groceries. Then he opened a fresh bottle of the Finlandia vodka and sliced a lemon into wedges. He poured the liquor into an old-fashioned glass, watching it smoke slightly over the ice. He gave it a minute to chill, then raised the glass to his lips. The first taste brought goose bumps.

Ordinarily, he would have worked out first, but tonight he was not even going to pretend. He had been scheduled to work the day after tomorrow, but he had called Vernon Dickhaut and arranged for Vernon to take over for him. Monks had not given a reason—just said something had come up. He had not wanted to explain that he might not be coming back to work ever again.

It had been a long time since he had felt like this.

He finished the drink in three strong swallows and poured another one to take with him to the shower. He stayed in for a long time, as if the almost scalding water could wash away the past two days. Then he dressed in clean jeans and a sweatshirt, poured a third drink, and took it out onto the deck.

Pacing, drinking steadily, he went through the story in his head, piecing together the information that he and Larrabee had coaxed out of Josh Hale.

Eden and Ray Dreyer had been living together in Los Angeles until several months ago. On a visit to San Francisco, through some connection, they had attended a party at the home of Dr. D. Welles D'Anton. There, Eden had caught the eye of Julia D'Anton, the doctor's wife.

Julia was a sculptress—Monks recalled her strong hands, work clothes, and the stone chips he had seen in the back of her SUV—and a patroness of the arts. She had asked Eden to pose for her.

Not long after that, Eden had started an affair with Dr. D'Anton. It must have been a hot one. She had moved to San Francisco, receiving quite a bit of money from him—along with free cosmetic surgery. It seemed that D'Anton planned to make her into a showpiece.

And Eden was trying to change her life accordingly. She was getting rid of Ray and her connections to his sleazy world. She was upgrading her wardrobe. There was something childishly wistful about it—the belief that by changing her clothes and body, that would change her being, too.

Never mind that the trigger for it all was an affair with a married man, which, given its intensity, seemed likely to end in divorce. Eden may have been sweet and naive, but she obviously had no compunctions about taking D'Anton away from his wife.

Monks wondered if that was why Gwen Bricknell had lied about Eden being “just another patient”—if Gwen had known about the affair and was trying to protect D'Anton. If the news came out, it would make for a juicy scandal.

But while it might be unethical for a physician to have sex with a patient, it was not illegal. And none of the information put Monks any closer to knowing who might have murdered Eden Hale, or why—or even
whether
that was, in fact, what had happened.

Still, some potential motives were starting to appear, like shapes in fog.

Maybe D'Anton had wanted to end the affair—in spite of what Eden had told her brother Josh—and Eden
had
blackmailed him.

Or Julia D'Anton, fearing that her marriage was being destroyed, might have decided to remove the threat.

Ray Dreyer—jilted as a lover, and losing his long-term investment—was still on the charts, too.

There were many other possibilities that might or might not ever come to light. Including the damnable one that the salmonella in Eden Hale's bloodstream
was
what had killed her. That if Monks had recognized it and treated it differently, she might have lived. And all the rest of this was a waste of time and effort, a pathetic attempt at exoneration—an epilogue to a ruined medical career.

He went back inside and poured another drink, noting that the bottle was more than one quarter empty. He took the drink and the cordless phone back outside with him.

Martine answered on the third ring.

“It's me,” he said.

“Hi.” Her voice sounded remote.

“I just wondered what you're doing.”

“Nothing. Fixing dinner.”

Monks thought he heard talking in the background. It was probably the TV.

“Any developments?” she said. “On your—situation?”

“Yes,” he said, but then stopped, unable or unwilling to continue, at this remove. “Is there somebody there?”

She sighed. “No, Carroll.”

“Just asking. It will be good for you to make new friends.”

“Are you drinking?”

“Yes.” He took a long swallow, clinking the ice close to the phone so she would hear it.

“You really want to know what I'm doing?” she said. “I'm watching movies. The kind you were watching yesterday.”

Monks's forehead creased. Martine had occasionally brought a rented video home, but he was pretty sure they had not watched any in the past week or two, and he had not been to a theater in years.

“Yesterday?”

“Porn,” she said patiently.

“You're watching
porn
movies?”

“I never really have before. But—I don't know. I keep thinking about that young woman. What all that's about.”

“Are you learning anything?”

“You wish,” she said wickedly. Then, serious again: “I'm trying to imagine myself doing those things. Like, with two men at once, or even three.”

Monks was not sure he liked where this was going. “So, your interest isn't completely academic?”

“I don't know what it is,” she said. “Just looking at a different world. No, that's not all. There's some—prurience—is that the word?”

“One of them. Does it arouse you?”

“Some of it. Not much. It gets repetitious pretty quick.”

“There are only so many permutations,” Monks said.

“The dialogue's unbelievably bad.”

“I expect they improvise a lot.”

“Do
I
make sounds like that?” she said.

“Yes. But they're very musical.”

“You're blessed with the blarney, Monks.”

“Do you wish you were here?” he said.

“Yes. No. Carroll, I want to make this as easy as possible.”

“Of course, Martine. That's the right way to look at it.”

“Oh, go away.” This time, she sounded like she was starting to cry. The phone clicked off.

Monks thought about calling back. Instead, he finished the drink and poured another one. It occurred to him just how precise was the term
heavy heart.
When things started to go wrong, they seemed to go like an avalanche—first a few rocks that you might be able to dodge, but then the whole mountainside tearing loose and coming down on your head.

He drank, remembering, unwillingly, the other time in his life when he had been in a similar situation. The year was 1988. Monks was chief of emergency services at Bayview Hospital, in Marin County. He had been losing popularity there for some time: with some other physicians, because he would not look the other way at certain good-old-boy practices, such as uncredentialed procedures; with staff, because he had no tolerance for various forms of slackness that were considered perks in big hospitals.

One night Monks had monitored, by radio, a team of paramedics in the field who were attending an elderly seizure victim. The senior of the medics was certain it was a heart attack and that a shot of adenosine would save the elderly lady's life. Monks, miles away and unable to see the victim, had only pulse rate and blood pressure to go on. These, together, suggested that a heart block might be the only thing keeping her alive. Adenosine would remove it.

He forbade the shot, clearly, twice. Radio contact was then mysteriously lost from the paramedics' end. When it was reestablished, some eight minutes later, the shot had been administered and the patient was dead.

The senior paramedic then claimed that Monks
had
ordered the shot. His partner, and the hospital staff who had been there in the ER, seemed uncertain.

The radio tape was hard evidence of what had really happened. But the paramedics were well connected to the sheriff's department—and the tape disappeared en route to the evidence room.

Monks, the Emergency Room, and the hospital had been sued. Then, as now, the hospital's administration had wanted to settle out of court. That would have saved money and bad publicity, but Monks would have been left tagged by the tacit verdict of negligence. He had fought it, and eventually won.

Or at least he had won that aspect of it. In between, he had discovered hard and fast that he had been mistaken about many things, and people, that he had taken for granted. It had precipitated a tailspin that had been building anyway, with him first giving in to it and then pushing it. When it ended, some four years later, he was no longer employed, no longer married, and largely a stranger to the world he had lived in before.

He finished the drink and poured another one, then walked down to the Bronco. He unlocked the safety-deposit box he had bolted under the driver's seat and took out the pistol he carried there, a Model 82 Beretta, 7.65-millimeter, double action, simple blued steel. He carried it back up to the deck.

The Beretta was a little smaller than his open hand and weighed just over a pound. It had a nine-shot clip, with room for another round in the chamber. That was an important thing to remember about automatics. When a revolver's cylinder was empty, so was the pistol. But even when the clip was out of an automatic, the gun had that one more bullet, hidden, right there in firing position. A lot of people had been killed through failure to recognize that.

The 7.65's weakness was that it did not have much stopping power. The trade-off was that he could slip it in his back pants pocket. He kept a .357 Colt Python in his house safe, which would blow a hole in a car engine, but it was heavy and bulky. There were some higher-caliber automatics available that were not much bigger than the Model 82, and from time to time he thought about moving up to one of those.

But then, he had never fired a weapon at a living thing, and never intended to.

The pistol still had a light sheen of oil from the last time he had cleaned it. That had been more than a year ago, after the last time he had actually carried it and the closest he had ever come to using it, against a pair of junkie muggers deep in the Mission District.

The next dawn was when he and Martine had first become lovers, right here on this deck.

The pistol had a good weight, a
feel,
and when he chambered a round, there was a satisfying metallic click. Monks could see why guns were so popular. When you had one of these in your hand, you were somebody.

He made sure there were no cats around and aimed at a dead tree about thirty feet away, downhill toward the creek, away from neighbors. In the past, he had been a surprisingly good shot. Larrabee claimed it was the same steady nerves and hands that made him solid in the ER.

The gun cracked with a sharp little sound like the pop of a whip, jerking slightly in his hand. He fired the rest of the clip, then walked down to the tree. He could see that several of the slugs were imbedded in the wood, but probably not all. It was hard to hit anything more than a few yards away with a barrel this short.

The .357, with a six-inch barrel, was a lot more accurate.

He went inside and got it out of the safe. His glass was empty again. He poured another drink on his way back out.

The .357 made a lot more noise than the Beretta, too, a big hollow boom that echoed up and down the canyon through the evening air. Monks squeezed off the rest of the cylinder's six shots, blowing fist-sized chunks of dead wood out of the tree. This time, there was no need to go down there and see if he had hit.

But if you really wanted to get down to business, a 12-gauge shotgun was your man. Monks got out the Remington from its hiding place, behind a panel in the hall closet. He stepped back out onto the deck, raised it to his shoulder, and blasted off the four rounds in the magazine.

When the last echoes died, the tree was cut almost in half and the forest was very still. Monks was breathing hard. He laid the shotgun on a table beside the pistols and drained his glass again. He went inside and poured another.

Dusk was verging on night by now. In the thick woods that stretched down to the creek, moonlight glowed off the sinuous trunks of the smooth-barked madrones. The chorus of tree frogs was rising toward full swing, a soothing singsong pulse that would last until dawn. Monks could hear the rushing wings of bats, welcome because they cleared the air of mosquitoes, although at times they crawled inside the house's walls and talked in whispers that sounded eerily human. Somewhere, a dog barked, a sudden baying of alarm. It was picked up by another dog a quarter mile farther away, and then another, a canine telegraph that might stretch all the way to the Mississippi River, a dogless barrier too wide for sound to cross.

He knew that he had come to that long-gone but so familiar edge, where too much of what lay behind was pain and nothing ahead mattered, where black rage ruled him, and one little step would put him over. The last time he had been there was the night he had almost strangled Alison Chapley with her own scarf. He had never let himself get that close since.