Voodoo Moon (28 page)

"Why are you laughing?"

"Because," he said, "you and
Kibbe
are such stupid pricks. I'm not Paul
Renard
. My name is Wayne
DeVries
."

"I
seduced her, and it wasn't easy. For one thing, I was her father's best friend. And for another, she hated me. At first, anyway. Here was this beautiful sixteen-year-old girl who drove around in a Porsche convertible and slept with all the right boys at school and was apparently trying to set a record with abortions. She'd had three before her sixteenth birthday. I had just turned forty. I was overweight and depressed and impotent. My practice was the only thing I had going. My wife had her clubs and her charities and my two boys had their computer games and the matching BMWs we'd bought them for their seventeenth birthday. Our house was very much a motel. Always very busy but always very impersonal. We didn't even have dinner together. The boys always ate in the TV room and more and more my wife wasn't home when I got there. I suspected she was having an affair but I didn't care. One drunken night, I tried humping the maid. You don't think that's embarrassing, especially when you can't get it up? I finally had to fire the woman—I gave her a great severance my wife didn't know anything about. I just couldn't face her every day with that knowing look of hers. 'He can't get it up.' That's what the look said. And it wasn't paranoia. Employees love to have their superior little secrets about employers. And that was the most cutting secret of all.

"So now we come to Ellie. I'm not good at describing people so I won't even try. All I can say is that she was beautiful. And gentle and graceful and subtle. I'd been hired to be her psychiatrist, and as such that was the first thing I noticed, the contrast between her soft personality and her hard life. She was a great fan of Debussy and Monet and Emily Dickinson. And yet at night she'd change into this totally different person. The sleaziest bars. Drugs. Alcohol. Every kind of sex you can conceive of. That's why she'd had three abortions before she was sixteen.

"I said that I seduced her. I'm not sure about that. It could well have been the other way around. After I'd seen her three months, I felt a shift in her attitude toward me. Oh, I don't mean she suddenly saw me as this paramour, but I think she did begin to see me as a person. A person she liked. I'm sure you know about transference, how the patient frequently thinks she's falling in love with her doctor. Ellie—the good Ellie, at any rate—seemed to be going through that with me. She'd write me poems. Brings me flowers that she'd picked. She even took me out for pizza one night. I tried to pretend that I was still in charge. Family man. Respected shrink. Wise and knowing sophisticate. Of course I was in charge. That's why, when it happened that first time in my office, I saw it as my doing, not hers.

"But by then it was too late to matter. I'd never been in love before. I'd never been handsome or dashing or anything like that, so I'd always been forced to be with the 'sensible' girls. Ellie was the opposite of sensible, of course. The danger was exhilarating. She taught me so much about making love. I fancied I became good at it. I saw now that I'd never pleased my wife. No wonder she'd had an affair. Or maybe affairs plural, who knows. I became saturated with Ellie. I wouldn't brush my teeth after we made love. I wanted the taste of her to linger as long as it could. When we were apart, I'd put her photograph next to a flickering candle and masturbate. It got so bad, I couldn't not be with her. She gave up the bad Ellie. So we could be together nights. I truly believe she loved me as much as I loved her. And then she told me she was pregnant.

"I spent a whole month pleading with her to have an abortion. We had terrible arguments. She actually wanted to keep the baby.

"I'd come to my senses. I looked at myself in the mirror one day and saw what a tremendous joke I'd played on myself. I was this chunky, nearsighted, rumpled cuckold who'd fallen in love with this beautiful but clinically insane girl who'd been under my care. My God, a quietly unhappy marriage in suburbia was just where I belonged. It was my fate, as the French would say, and I should embrace it. I wanted to be part of the same old monotony again. I'd destroyed my life and humiliated my family. I had to get rid of the baby. I even thought seriously for a time of killing Ellie. I came up with several different creative methods. But I knew I couldn't do it. I wasn't a murderer. I was too weak even for that.

"I kept pestering her, of course. We'd have these terrible arguments in my office. She'd always end up weeping and screaming at me to let her have the baby. My nurse would rush in and remind me that there were patients in the reception area hearing her scream. My whole life was coming apart.

"And then she got in that car wreck.

"By this time, her parents were very suspicious of me. She refused to talk about me to them. So when she died in the car crash—her car suddenly swerved into the path of a semi, whether intentionally or not we'll never know because the highway was very dark and icy—and when they did the autopsy and found out Ellie had been pregnant, all their suspicions were confirmed.

"I tried to lie my way out of it, but the medical tests proved my paternity. My wife immediately went back to Connecticut where her people are. Very wealthy people, too. They found a house for her and the boys. I speak to the boys at Christmastime now. On the phone. Very antiseptic and formal.

"My life was over. At least until I read this magazine article in
Esquire
about how, if you have the money, you can re-create yourself. A little bit of plastic surgery, a lot of forged documents, three or four forged recommendations, and you are a new person.

"I applied for three or four positions. One institution was about to hire me, but somebody on the hospital staff got suspicious and decided to check out one of my reference letters. I immediately withdrew my application.

"The third time, I got lucky. Here in Brenner. I was now Dr. Williams. Head of my own psychiatric hospital, an honor I'd never had before. And now, thanks to you, Mr. Payne, an honor I will have no longer."

"Quite a story."

"And all of it true."

"Sadly."

"Very sadly."

"The coffee's good, anyway."

We sat in his kitchen nook. The Mr. Coffee had done a decent job.

"I was going to run away."

"I know."

"I have a friend in Mexico. He's on the run, too. Sort of the same thing except it involved money instead of sex."

"Money?"

"He got this elderly woman patient of his to sign over several very valuable pieces of property to him. Which he promptly sold. He's got several federal agencies looking for him."

"You two just might give psychiatry a bad name."

He smiled. "If only you knew what really went on, Mr. Payne."

I said, "I'd consider going to the hospital and telling them the truth and seeing what happens."

"You mean they might keep me on?"

I shrugged. "Beats running and hiding the rest of your life." He sipped some coffee. "I imagine you're disappointed."

"About you not being
Renard
?"

"Yes."

I shrugged. "Things happen that way sometimes."

"He's alive."

I had been stirring sugar into my coffee. I looked up. "You really believe that?"

"Absolutely. He's been taunting me for over a year."

"Taunting you how?"

"Phone messages. He tells me to go back through his records and look for little details he discussed with his shrink. We inherited whatever records survived the asylum fire, since some of the staff doctors are now employed with us. Whoever he is knows things only
Renard
could know. Names and dates."

"Why didn't you go to the police?"

"Put yourself in my place, Mr. Payne. You don't go to the police unless it's absolutely necessary. Absolutely. And since
Renard
—or whoever he was—wasn't hurting anybody that I knew of, I decided to overlook it. I didn't want to give the police any excuse to start nosing around in my life."

"I guess that makes sense." I gulped the last of my coffee. "I'll think about what you said."

"I won't let the hospital know what I found out for twenty-four hours. Give you time to think it over."

"I appreciate that."

I still didn't like him. But at least I didn't hate him anymore.

T
he suit was Armani, the woman was bulletproof Professional.

"Hello," she said, offering a slender but strong hand, "I'm Courtney. Tandy has told me so much about you."

"She's inside."

"
Ummm
. Being interviewed. NBC."

"And, Courtney, you're with?"

"Pyramid. Pyramid Media."

"Ah."

"We produce Tandy's show."

"Ah."

"Since Laura is dead, the company told me to hustle my buns out here and cover for her."

Given her nice, humorless face, her sensational and probably real breasts, and her excellent perfect legs, I had no doubt her buns were also
gapeworthy
. I guess it was her eyes that spoiled the effect of the other body parts. Nobody had any right to look this happy in the face of Laura's death. But then, without Laura's demise, we wouldn't have NBC in Tandy's room, would we?

I'd gone up to my room. All her stuff was gone. The gentleman at the front desk told me that she'd been assigned a new room. Which was where I stood now. Facing the guard Pyramid had dispatched.

"Any idea how long you think she'll be?"

"I'm not sure, Robert. If I may call you that. But I'll be sure to have her call you if she gets the chance."

If.

Given that Tandy's fate was clearly in Courtney's hands, I doubted I'd be seeing her tonight.

"Tell her I need to talk about the drawing."

"The drawing," she repeated. "Got it. Now I'd better get back inside."

Oh, yeah, she would be sending Tandy right out.

I
drove over to Wendy's and got a salad in the drive-through. I stopped at a convenience store for a quart of
Hamms
. I drove slowly back to the motel. It was kind of a make-out night. All the hot small-town cars up, their radios illegally loud. I saw a college-age girl in an old battered Plymouth. She had a University of Iowa parking sticker on her windshield. She wasn't really what you'd call a babe—actually, I've always been attracted to the quiet, pretty, bookish types instead of the babes—but I made up a little history of her. Good-looking, bright girl from poor family has to work so hard she never has time for a social life. And then she meets the famed Right Guy, not unlike me, who eloquently and persuasively convinces her with his silver tongue, not unlike mine, that she is truly a beauty and needs only self-esteem to realize all the good and great things waiting for her. She looked over at me for a moment and I was tempted to roll down my window and tell her all the things in my head. But I figured with my luck, I'd get arrested and she'd run off with the bail bond guy or something.

There was a good Robert
Mitchum
picture,
Track of the Cat
, on TNT. I watched the whole thing. It was ten o'clock. Two hours since being deflected by the unctuous Courtney.

I decided it was time to try the
Gileses
. See if they were asleep yet.

I dug out the phone book and called.

Mr. Giles answered on the first ring.

I hung up.

I tried Tandy's room. Busy. Tried the operator. She got a busy, too. Should she report it? No, thanks. Courtney had no doubt taken the phone off the hook.

Restless. Paced. Tried Tandy again. Busy.

Then somehow it miraculously became ten-thirty. Tried the
Gileses
' again. Mr. Giles barked "Who is it?" after the first ring.

I sat down and finished off the beer. And fell asleep. Tension was gone; exhaustion overcame me. I hadn't slept well in a couple of nights. Now I was drained.

The Exercise-in-a-Spray infomercial was on. That's right. No dieting. No exercising. Just spray this on your body and you magically begin to lose weight and tone up. Gee, and to think there were probably cynics who thought that the stuff didn't work.

I went to the bathroom and came out and tried Tandy. She surprised me by answering. "Wow. What a night, Robert. NBC."

"How's the drawing going?"

"Oh, that. I really haven't had time to get back to it yet."

"Oh."

Pause. "I'll try, though. I'm too wired to sleep, anyway. And I do keep getting these flashes. Just like the old days, Robert. Laura always said it would come back to me." Hesitation. "Every time I think of her, I feel like shit. I turned out to be just like her. I like all this celebrity stuff. And I was always making fun of her for it." Teary-voiced. "I loved her so much, Robert. Our relationship got so complicated by the end, I know. But the bottom line is that I loved her so much." Another hesitation. "I really will work on the drawing, Robert. Maybe something'll come to me in the middle of the night. You know, the way it used to."