Trust Me (22 page)

CHAPTER 50

⍫

They crossed Purdue and headed for the West Los Angeles Police station.
Inside, they waited as the desk sergeant went to get Joe Greiner.

“He seems like a pretty decent guy,” Jeff said.

“Who, the sergeant?”

“Yeah.”

“Why shouldn’t he be?”

“I don’t know. I’m just used to thinking of cops as assholes.”

“Most of the cops I know,” Ron said, “are pretty decent guys.”

Sitting in Joe Greiner’s cramped cubicle, Jeff looked around at the bulletins, sticky-notes, mug shots, and general clutter that covered every available surface. Next to the computer screen was a picture of a pudgy boy of about ten, he guessed, with the same big nose that Joe had.

“So how was your visit with his honor Tim Metcalf today?” Greiner was as gruff as the last time Jeff had met him, but with a trace of humor this time, like he was ready to lighten up some.

“Unreal,” Jeff said.

“Yeah, you can never tell whether he’s gonna hang ’em or hug ’em. What did you get, probation?”

“One year.”

“Santa came early for you this year.” Joe bent over from his seat with a grunt and picked a folder from a briefcase lying open on the floor. “Let’s get down to business. Hey, what happened to the girl?”

Ron explained that they had driven her back to her car in Malibu late Sunday morning and had followed her back to her apartment. “She invited us up to her place. Everything seemed okay there. We had some coffee and then left. Oh, and we swapped out her lock on the front door.”

Joe opened the folder he had picked up. “Our man has an interesting background. Two of them, in fact.” He picked a sheet from the folder. “Art Bradley. Never had a brush with the authorities, not even a traffic ticket. Has a California driver’s license, five years old. Prior to that, he doesn’t exist.” He threw the sheet on the desk. “Probably picked the name from hospital records, infant that died at birth around the same year Art was born.”

“And prior to five years ago?” Ron asked.

“Well, then we get a much more colorful personality.” He picked the next page from the file and waved it briefly. “Jack Stanley, a psychiatrist, Canadian citizen. Five drunk driving arrests in six years, all up in the Bay area. Must have had a pretty good lawyer—he never did any time. He did, however, lose his license to practice. Here . . .” He pulled a computer printed mug shot from the folder and handed it to Ron.

“That’s him all right. He’s looking pretty ragged here.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “They probably booked him the morning after. Now, check this: he was wanted as a witness—not a suspect—in the disappearance of two students from the art school up there. Both female. Still unresolved, and that’s when Jack Stanley dropped off the planet.”

“And Art Bradley began to create a life for himself in Los Angeles.” Ron studied the mug shot and then handed it back to Joe.

“What a coincidence.” Joe turned to Jeff. “So you knew him in his previous incarnation. What do you remember about him? Anything that pops into your mind, even trivial details, might help.”

Jeff thought back to the days when he had a business relationship with one of San Francisco’s major rock promoters. His job was to deliver a pound of coke a week. The promoter never sold any of it; he snorted enough to kill an elephant and gave the rest away to grease the wheels of the music business. Dr. Jack Stanley was part of the inner circle, along with the upper-echelon musicians, groupies, and a few outsiders: attorneys, financial backers, even a city councilman.

“They used to call him Doctor Jack,” he began and then hesitated.

“Go on,” Joe said. “I don’t give a shit about what you were doing up there.”

“Yeah, well . . . He was always a snappy dresser. And he knew all the party girls, the bimbos and the pros. Shep Donahue, the guy I worked for, used to call Doctor Jack if some big shot came into town and wanted a certain kind of girl.”

“What do you mean, ‘a certain kind of girl’?” Joe asked.

“Something other than the groupie trash that anyone could have. Sometimes he’d get requests, like for twins or for special talent. There was this one from Nicaragua, Anna Banana, the Mouth from the South, they used to call her. Or maybe someone wanted a real clean-cut college type. Doctor Jack would always come through.”

Joe pulled out a note pad and a pen. “Okay, get into it. Details, whatever comes to your mind.”

He thought about the old times. Back when everything worked. He would take the money from the coke and buy pounds of top-grade weed from his connection in Humboldt, then take it down to LA.

“He wasn’t into drugs. He always had some coke—mine, but he got it through Mark, this promoter—” He stopped, reddening in sudden discomfort.

“I’m telling you, for Christ’s sake, don’t worry about it.” Joe laughed and shook his head.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “Anyway, Doctor Jack kept the coke for the girls. Plus, he was everyone’s pill connection. But he only drank booze. Lots of it.” He could picture the man in his impeccable Italian suits, drinking ’round the clock with the rest of the gang, still the life of the party the next day when all the druggies were burnt out and fading. “He liked Moosehead beer and Bushmills. The beer was his daytime drink.”

The cop seemed to be writing down more than Jeff was telling. When he stopped, he tapped his pen twice on the pad and looked up. “Did the guy have a real practice? You know, as a therapist?”

“Oh yeah,” Jeff said. “He had an office over by Union Square. Very upscale.”

“Anything else?” Joe reached for a half donut that was perched amid the clutter on his desk.

“Not much comes to mind. Oh . . . he did introduce me to Lilah.”

“Who’s Lilah?” Joe jotted down the name.

He shrugged. “Some wacko party girl.” He decided to leave it at that.

The cop wasn’t going for it. “I’m supposed to write that down? I mean, you singled her out like her name should mean something. What’s up?”

Jeff looked over at Ron, who knew some of his history with Lilah. “Well, we, um, hung out a lot.”

“That’s informative,” Ron said. “Was she your girlfriend?”

Jeff thought of Lilah, her wild hair and ridiculous mannerisms. The way her lips stuck to her teeth when she was high. The paradox of her softness and toughness when she was straight.

“She was everybody’s girlfriend.”

“Where is she now?” Joe prodded.

He told the detective Lilah’s address, adding, “I don’t think he even knows she’s down here, so I doubt she’ll help us.”

There was a pause where no one spoke. Finally Ron stood up and said, “Are you going to bring him in?”

“Not yet,” Joe said. “Without Holly, there’s not enough to go with. But you’ve my attention at last—something’s got to come up that will tie this all together.”

“I’ve got some ideas to follow up,” Ron said. “Let’s talk tomorrow.”

As they crossed the street to get to Ron’s car, Jeff heard Joe’s voice.

“Hey, Jeff!”

He turned around. The detective was standing at the top step by the station entrance.

“You take it easy now.”

No cop had ever told him to take it easy.

CHAPTER 51

⍫

Holly woke to a sense of dread.
She felt as if she were in a strange place, somewhere she had never been, rather than her own bed. She wondered why she had been so adamant about going home despite Ron and Jeff’s misgivings.

The day before, when Jeff and Ron were leaving, she had thanked them again, then closed the door and turned the new lock, a deadbolt with a smooth, well-oiled action and a satisfyingly solid feel to it. She had looked through the fisheye lens in the door, peering out at a distorted view of the landing, the few steps to her doorway, the brick courtyard and the hedge beyond. Nobody coming.

She had then walked quietly, carefully, around every room, along every wall, of her apartment, studying, trying to feel what was wrong. She had even checked out the closets—nothing seemed to have been disturbed, yet something was very disturbing, and the new lock did very little to reassure her.

So now it was Monday. Other than dread, she felt numb. Funny, she thought, how near the word dread was to dead.

She stared out the kitchen window at a cloudless blue early-September sky, finishing her cereal and coffee without even noticing the process. When she was done, she put the dishes in the sink and went back to the table.

She tapped a key on her phone and watched the screen come to life. Shaking her head, hating what she was doing, she selected the link that Art had sent.

Holly, it’s important—critical even—for your psychological well-being and spiritual health

What a load of crap. The guy was a nut, a psychopath. What did he know about psychological well-being and spiritual health?

The key to your re-integration with the inner child . . .

Bullshit.

There was something new.

“Dear, dear Holly.” That voice, patient, chiding. “I never took you for a leaper. Pills maybe. Possibly even a wrist slasher, but never a leaper.” In the background, she could hear the sounds of cars passing, the Miles Davis CD playing in the background. She pictured Art, driving the Jag down the Coast Highway, speaking into his phone.

“And now you are born again. Really, what you have is much like a new life. With new people. And we . . . Well, Holly, we are moving apart. For the time being. It reminds me of two people dancing who have changed partners. Now I am moving across the floor and away from you. In a short while, the dance will bring us together. It’s too bad, really. You remind me so much of someone I once loved.”

His voice had that same smooth, self-assured quality that he had always carried. What did he mean, the dance will bring us together? She imagined herself waving her hands in his face, saying,
Hello, guess what? I’m awake now, what are you going to do, shoot me from a distance, you moron?

“I’m thinking of going away for a while. I have some matters to clean up, so to speak. Loose ends, as it were.”

Staring at the phone, she imagined herself hitting Art, striking him again and again. She pictured him shrinking as she flailed at him, becoming insubstantial, like tissue paper, and drifting away on the breeze. Mechanically, against her best resistance, she kept watching.

The session began.

“Holly.” Art’s voice, gentle, and friendly. “Here. I’d like you to take this.”

She remembered the teddy bear.

“Now I’d like you to cradle it. That’s right; and close your eyes and rock it. That’s it.”

There was silence, and then the sound of her crying softly.

“Holly, I want you to open and shut your eyes rapidly over and over again.” There was a tapping, rhythmic sound. “This fast, and don’t stop.”

More silence. She remembered the effect of blinking her eyes, the two little orange pills, the heat of the sunlight coming in the window.

“Now, Holly, I’m going to ask you some questions and I want you to go back and find the answers. Don’t try to remember. Go back and be there. Do you understand?”

Art’s voice was saying, “. . . take a deep breath. Very good. Okay, who
hurt
you when you were little?”

Nothing. Then, quietly: “Holly, who hurt you when you were little?”

“Uncle Dave hurt me.” It was a whisper.

“What did he do?” Art prodded.

“I . . .”

“Show me,” Art said.

“I can’t,” Holly heard herself say.

“Show me,” Art insisted. “I’m Uncle Dave now. Show me. I won’t hurt you. Trust me.”

And then she heard that sound. She turned away, unable to watch what she knew was coming.

The sound of leather sliding through a buckle, the twenty-year-old noise of a zipper, a rustle of fabric.

She remembered Uncle Dave’s hand on the back of her head. Art’s hand.

Her left hand twitched slightly and then jumped with a strange will of its own. She knew what this was and moved toward the telephone but never got there. A power greater than herself had taken over; it would have its way with her, as it always had, until it was done, and she would wake up in a hospital, or on a restaurant floor, or in the aisle of an airplane, or safe in her bed, grateful, if the last, to be unbloodied and unbruised.

CHAPTER 52

⍫

On Tuesday, Ron sat at his desk at work, finishing up a piece on telemarketing scammers that were ripping off elderly citizens.
There was the Nigerian government refund charade, FCC wireless-license lottery general partnerships, and the usual oil and gas “investments,” all preying on retirees, trying to separate them from the savings they lived on. He was listing tactics for defending against these callers—“Tell them you just need to switch phones, then put the receiver down, off the hook, and leave it there for twenty minutes”—when Peter Riddle, one of the whiz kids from the research department, set a computer printout in front of him. He looked up and saw that the kid was grinning. “That was fast. What did you find?”

Peter was about twenty-two, an intern, probably still in college. “I started with all the Stanleys in the Vancouver area and struck out, so I backtracked from the San Francisco Board of Licensing and found out that Jack Stanley was credentialed out of the University of Washington. I called the university and they pulled records tracing him to a Valley High School in Vancouver, BC.”

“Wonderful.” He could have done the work, but the interns upstairs were faster and seemed to enjoy the thrill of the hunt. “So who is—” he picked up the print-out “—Phyllis Stanley?”

Peter beamed. “Jack Stanley’s sister. According to city records, she was his legal guardian after their mother died. Father’s whereabouts unknown. Jack was eleven, the sister seventeen.”

“No kidding.” The sister’s current address was in Escondido, an inland city in what they called North County in San Diego County. He looked up. “Thanks, Peter. Good work.”

It was 10:30. In another half hour he could turn in the scam-artist piece, and nothing else on his desk was on fire. It was stacking up but could wait another day. He hadn’t seen Leanne for what seemed like too long—and he knew she had this Tuesday off. Hoping that she would be home, he dialed her number.

“Hello?” It was odd: hearing her voice, he could smell her hair.

“Hi there. This is Sal Monella from Oil and Gas Technology Investors. How are you today, Ma’am?”

There was a pause. “Sal Monella?” And a slight laugh. “Pretty well, thanks. How can I help you?” She seemed uncertain.

He hadn’t expected to fool her, just to make her laugh with the silly name. “We’re looking for experienced investors who can handle some degree of risk in order to participate in an extremely high-yield investment opportunity. Do you fit that profile?”

He was sure Leanne would recognize his voice. Instead, she said, “Just a minute, let me switch phones.” He heard her put down the receiver. A Mary Black song was playing in the background. Vague clattering noises would accompany the music now and then, as though Leanne were picking up around the house. The song ended and a new one started; the commotion in the background continued. When a vacuum cleaner switched on, he hung up and went back to finishing his piece.

Twenty minutes later, the phone on his desk rang.

“Hi.” It was Leanne. “Am I interrupting your work?”

“No, I just wrapped it up. How’s it going?”

“I just got this ridiculous call.”

“Really?”

Leanne sounded amused. “Yeah. One of those scam-artist calls.” Was she putting him on? “Hey, aren’t you doing a piece on telemarketing hustles?”

“As we speak.”

“Gee, I should have kept the guy on the phone longer and told you what the whole pitch was.”
Gee
.

“Did you get his name?”

“Um, let me see . . . Sal something-or-other.” Sticking to her guns.

“How did you get rid of him?” What the hell.

“I put him on hold.” She giggled. “Anyway, when do I get to see you?”

“How about lunch?” He told her about Phyllis Stanley and suggested that Leanne join him on the drive to Escondido. “There’s a good Mexican restaurant in Carlsbad. We can stop there for lunch.”

He scanned the telemarketing piece and had just hit the print command on the PC, anxious to get in his car and pick up Leanne in Santa Monica, when his phone rang again.

“Ron?” It was Jeff.

“Hey, how are you doing?” Part of the deal with Jeff was that he check in on a daily basis. Ron’s portion of these conversations often seemed to consist entirely of “Hmmm . . . really? . . . gee, that’s too bad,” while Jeff went through his litany of woes. Finally, Ron would tell him to cut the crap, make a few suggestions, and they would hang up. Right now, he wasn’t feeling up to it.

“I got a call from Holly.” He sounded agitated.

“Okay. How is she?”

“Not so good. She told me she had some kind of seizure yesterday. Now she says that someone’s watching her.”

“Watching her? Where is she?” He checked his watch: it was ten past eleven.

“She’s in her apartment. She says she woke up last night and someone was in her closet.” Jeff gave a nervous laugh. “In her closet, can you believe it?”

“Did she check to see if anyone was there?” Poor girl. It would be terrifying, he imagined, opening a closet when you were convinced someone was inside.

“She says she talked to him first. Told him what an asshole he was, and that she was calling the police.”

He asked, “Who does she think it was?”

Jeff said, “Art—Jack Stanley. She says she got a kitchen knife and watched the door all night. Then when she opened it in the morning he was gone.”

“How does she explain that?”

“She wants me to come over tonight so she can show me. What do you think?”

He couldn’t come up with an answer. The kid sure didn’t need a weird scene like this right now. But hell, he was already in it. “Doesn’t she have any friends? Or family nearby?”

“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “She called me.”

⍫

When Ron pulled up in front of Leanne’s apartment, she was just opening the door at the front entrance. He got out of the Land Rover and watched her as she walked down the few stairs and along the brick pathway that led through a well-kept lawn and neat garden to a wrought-iron gate that let out onto the sidewalk. She smiled as she saw him and, closing the gate behind her, walked up to him, kissed his lips briefly, then pressed her lips to the V of his chest exposed by his open shirt collar. The noon sun glinted off her hair, and he breathed in a subtle scent of rose as he held her.

Heading south on the 405, he told Leanne the little he knew about Art Bradley/Jack Stanley’s sister.

“Did she ask what you wanted to talk about?” Leanne asked.

“She doesn’t know we’re coming.” He had made that decision pretty easily. The door is too easy to close over the phone. If Phyllis Stanley had refused to see him, it would be unlikely that a follow-up visit would change anything.

“So we’re winging it, then.” She smiled as she said it.

Later, as they approached Long Beach and had finally passed the dense knot of noon traffic, he remembered his conversation with Jeff. Leanne sat sideways in her seat, one leg tucked under her as she faced him and listened while he recounted the story.

When he was done, she nodded thoughtfully and said nothing. He switched to the diamond lane, picked up some speed, and then asked, “Well, what do you think?”

“It’s a very sad story,” Leanne said. She wasn’t analyzing the facts of the story, he realized, but instead was feeling the plight of the girl.

“Remember what I told you about how she behaved after the murder attempt? How she sat there conversing as though she had just come in from a casual swim?”

“Yes,” Leanne said. “She’s learned not to feel her feelings. No wonder she has seizures.”

“And instead of experiencing her justifiable fear—what she’s just gone through—she’s manifesting paranoid delusions.” He turned up the air conditioning a notch.

“With Art as the logical candidate for a bogeyman.” Leanne reached out and put her hand on his thigh. “Your guy Jeff is in an interesting position. What did you tell him to do?”

He shrugged. “What could I say? He works ’til six. He’s got a commitment at a seven-thirty meeting—I told him he can’t duck out on that—and then he’ll head over to the girl’s place. If his car will get him that far.”

They drove in silence for a while, Ron content just to have Leanne close by, this old friendship with its brand new dimension, so full of promise and so natural in its unfolding. After a while he put an old Yusef Latif CD on and the hypnotic lines of the sax took them through Irvine and Laguna Niguel, past San Clemente and down into the clear open land of Camp Pendleton.

“Everything seems to change right through here,” Leanne said over the music.

“I know,” he replied. “The sky seems bigger.”

“And bluer. I like it.”

He left the freeway at Carlsbad Village Drive and drove west almost to the coast before turning into a parking area that serviced some attractive shops, a small resort, and a Mexican restaurant with a sign that said, “Welcome to Fidel’s.”

They both ordered chicken tostadas and ice tea. When the waitress left Leanne said, “I hope they cook their chicken properly here.” There was a twinkle in her eye.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Fidel’s was an attractive place and a very good restaurant, and he was surprised that Leanne would question it.

“Well,” Leanne said, dipping a chip into the guacamole they had been served, “I just saw an article on contaminated chicken. You can get food poisoning from some kind of bacteria . . .”

“Salmonella,” he said, and then saw that Leanne was looking down at the table in front of her, her long hair almost hiding the expression on her face. She was barely suppressing a laugh.

⍫

It took another twenty minutes to get from Fidel’s to Escondido. Heading inland, the scenery went from coastal eclectic to a uniformity of pink houses with rust-colored tile roofs and then became suddenly rural where the development stopped and the original flavor of San Diego County had been left intact. Then, as they got farther east, a new flavor, city-in-the-desert, took over.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Leanne asked, after he had made several seemingly random turns and they wound up back on the main road they had come in on. She seemed amused.

He looked at his notes, which were scrawled on a pad that extended from a suction cup that adhered to the dash panel. “McAllister Road was supposed to run into Old Grove, but it didn’t. Or at least, I didn’t see it.” He turned the car around and backtracked to McAllister. This time, by going straight instead of following the curve of the road, they wound up on Old Grove, winding uphill with a ravine to their right. A sudden left turn took them away from the ravine and into a private drive. Next to an open gate a sign said, “Welcome to the VALLEY VIEW RETIREMENT COMMUNITY.”

“How old is this woman?” Leanne asked.

He slowed the Land Rover. The road had narrowed and now curved sharply uphill. “Our therapist friend’s records show him to be fifty-five, and she’s six years older, so . . .”

They pulled over a rise and suddenly came out on a plateau. To the left was a spectacular view of the lower hills and, beyond that, the sprawling valley city of Escondido. To the right was a long row of mobile homes, though mobility was not one of their features. Each qualified as a small house, with a patch of lawn and a garden or shrubbery separating it from the drive. Beyond the first row stretched other rows of identical homes.

A sign on the front door of the first structure said “MANAGER.” He pulled up to the empty carport next to it. A long ramp gently inclined up to the door. He had just stepped on the ramp, Leanne behind him, when a voice came from behind a screen door.

“Can I help you?” It was an unfriendly voice, not very convincing in its offer to help. The screen door remained closed.

“Yes,” he said. “We’re looking for Phyllis Stanley. I understand she lives here.”

“What do you want?” He could make out the outline of a person on the other side of the screen. A person sitting at the doorway.

“I’d like to ask her a few questions, that’s all.” He had the feeling that if this guardian of the community wanted to, she could prevent them from finding Art’s sister, and that their whole trip would be in vain. He wondered if phoning ahead would have been the better way to go.

“What kind of questions?” The voice maintained its suspicious tone; the figure behind the screen didn’t move.

“I’d rather take that up with Ms. Stanley.”

The voice said, “She’s not talking to anyone. Goodbye.”

It was hot in the mid-afternoon sun. A faint tang of sage wafted in on the breeze off the hillside. He looked down the row of mobile homes. A large American flag stuck out from the roof of the fourth home, and a thin old man with a powder-blue hat and gardening gloves pruned a rosebush below the trellised porch. Maybe, he thought, the old man will help us.

As Ron turned, Leanne called out, “We’re worried about her brother. We thought maybe she could help.”

There was a silence that seemed almost universal. Even the old man had stopped moving. Then the screen door slowly opened.

“Who are you?” The woman sat in a wheelchair, an expensive motorized one with a small tray in front of her like the kind that folds out from an airline seat. Her left hand operated the controls on the armrest. There was a cigarette in her right hand and a large glass half full of amber liquid on the tray.

Ron introduced himself and Leanne. He didn’t mention working for the
Times
.

“How do you know my brother?”

He had interviewed thousands of people in his career. Death row inmates, police, politicians, athletes, astronauts, and children, but somehow found himself unprepared for the question. As he searched for a response, Leanne said, “Your brother Jack tried to kill someone.” Well, there it was.

“Take it to the police.” The woman sat there, unmoving, her chair half in and half out of the doorway, the screen door propped open behind her by one of the large wheels. Her hair was steel-gray, swept back from her forehead and fastened severely in the back. Her features were well defined, eyes the same piercing blue that he remembered from seeing Art at the SOL meetings. Once, he thought, she might have been an attractive woman. Now she looked hardened by smoke and alcohol, by life and the desert; her skin was parched and dark, lined like a dry creek bed. A delicate gold crucifix hung from her neck.