Deadline, page 4
10.15 a.m.
My secretary-receptionist was a middle-aged Londoner called Jane Steel. Patients found her comforting. She didn’t threaten women, and she didn’t arouse men. She was friendly but never inquisitive; she had that southern English suspicion of easy intimacies. She imparted an impression of quiet brown-eyed sympathy, and discretion. I’d chosen her for the job on account of these qualities. She also had considerable organizational skills. In the two and a half years she’d worked for me, she’d reorganized the shambles of my filing-cabinets and supervised the installation of a computer system and a patient database, with the result that now the office worked smoothly.
She looked up at me as I entered. ‘Phil Stam cancelled, Jerry.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘No. Nothing.’
‘Did he reschedule?’
‘I asked, but he was vague.’
‘Curious,’ I said. Phil Stam, who suffered from agoraphobia, was a patient I felt I could help. I always looked forward to our sessions, when we worked together to chip away at his fears. I felt mildly disappointed.
Jane said, ‘It works out, because Joe Allardyce called, asking to see you as soon as he could. I sent him into the inner sanctum.’
‘OK,’ I said.
I had a policy to ensure that patients didn’t run into one another. The waiting/reception area, a neutral gray space, never had more than one patient waiting at any time – in theory. If I was running late, Jane ushered the patient into my private office, the inner sanctum; then, if the next patient arrived early, he or she would find the waiting area empty. Patients always left my office by a door that led them back to the elevators without having to return via reception. We were in the business not only of calming troubled souls and curing sick minds, but of sparing people embarrassment.
‘He’s in a jittery mood,’ Jane said.
‘He usually is.’ I stopped at the door of my office. ‘Have you had any calls about Emily Ford?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I would have told you.’
‘I think we can expect one or two pretty soon,’ I said. ‘You heard about this possible AG nomination?’
‘On TV this morning,’ she said. ‘So we can anticipate what – background checks? Spies from federal agencies?’
‘That kind of thing. If anyone calls in connection with Emily, put them straight through to me.’
‘Will do,’ she said. She wagged a pencil at me. ‘Meantime, Mr Allardyce needs you.’
I hesitated at the door of my office. ‘Oh. One other thing …’ I drew the moment out; I was enjoying it. ‘Sondra’s pregnant.’
‘No!’
‘She told me last night.’
Her eyes watered instantly. She knew how long we’d been trying for a child. ‘I’m so happy for you both, I can’t begin to tell you.’
‘You don’t have to,’ I said.
‘I’m thrilled for Sondra. I really am.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and entered my office where Allardyce was standing at the window, hands clasped behind his back. He was a small, squat man with broad, muscular shoulders. He was in his early fifties and balding. In his youth he must have been good-looking; something of a strong facial structure remained under the heavy flesh.
He glared at me with his blue eyes. He stretched his hands out in front of his body, like a swimmer testing water. They trembled. ‘I’m in a bad way, Jerry. A real bad way. That prescription you wrote doesn’t do shit. Look at me.’
I’d written him a script for Norpramin to counter his anxiety attacks. I had him on 50mg a day. I realized at once I’d have to increase the dosage. He was a man falling to pieces. A moderately successful movie producer who’d turned out a couple of back-to-back duds, he now found himself an exile in that tundra peculiar to Hollywood, a polar wasteland where nobody returned your calls, and old friends suddenly dropped you from their Christmas-card lists. You smelled of failure – and nobody wanted a reminder of how fast you could be an outcast in this town. A lot of desperate people wandered the tundra, all trying to get back in where the sun shone gold and deals were there to be struck and crisp dollars minted.
I told him to sit down.
‘Sit? I can’t sit, Jerry. I sit I get antsy. I gotta get up, walk around.’ He went to the window, walked back to my desk, then again to the window. He was like a man trapped in a pinball machine: back and forward, and no control over his destiny. ‘This fucking town, Jerry. This town, jeez,’ and he made a sweeping gesture at the window, ‘has just about destroyed me.’
‘You know what to do, Joe. Leave it.’
‘I can’t leave it.’
I knew he couldn’t. We’d discussed it before many times. I took a blue l0mg tab of Valium from a bubble-pack in the bottom drawer of my desk, where I always kept pharmaceuticals for emergency purposes, and I said, ‘Take this, Joe.’ I filled a glass with ice water from a small refrigerator concealed in a closet.
He stepped back to the desk and looked at the pill. ‘Valium?’
‘I’ll write you a stronger script before you go.’
He swallowed the tab, slurped some water. ‘Leave,’ he said. ‘That’s your best advice. That’s what I pay you for?’
I always ignored his barbs. ‘Your life is defined by this town,’ I said.
‘I make my living here, Chrissakes.’
I didn’t correct him. I didn’t say he should have used the past tense. ‘It’s a dependency,’ I said. ‘You’re as dependent on LA as any junkie strung-out on heroin. And now you’ve been cut off from your supply. We’re not going to get anywhere unless you face that one.’
‘OK. I’m hooked. You’re the doc. You got the fancy certificates on the wall. I bow to your wisdom –’
‘And you’re destroying yourself.’
‘I’m looking for a deal, Jerry. That’s all I need. One new frigging deal. Don’t talk to me about destroying. You know what the trouble is?’
‘Tell me.’ But I knew what he was going to say. Repetition was a major part of his relationship with me.
‘There’s people out there got it in for me. There’s people out there want to see me crushed. Some high-up – and I ain’t mentioning names – sent down the word from his icy fortress. “Allardyce is washed up. Allardyce don’t work in this town again. Employ him and it’s on your own head.”’
‘Why would any individual want to destroy you, Joe?’
He was quiet a moment, looking at me bleakly with his dead gray eyes. ‘I was in Rodeo Drive day before yesterday. I see Teddy Schramm coming down the sidewalk and I say, “Hi, long time.” He crosses the street, Jerry. Makes eye contact, but says absolutely nothing. Just crosses the street. I’m the invisible man. So maybe it’s Schramm who put out the word. Or one of his cronies. Or all of them.’
Teddy Schramm was a producer riding the waves of a big box-office ocean. He was Midas of the Moment. Like so many people in this town, he had absolutely no discernible skills. He had charm and luck and a fine suntan and a rich wife who pushed him because she enjoyed being on first-name terms with Meryl or Mel or Michelle or Meg. Maybe Schramm had all the fluffy ingredients you needed to make a successful confection of yourself in the motion-picture industry, this business crowded with con men, hustlers, pirates, egomaniacs, and half-literate people who sat by their swimming-pools and read ill-written, one-page outlines of scripts prepared by assistants who hadn’t skills enough to write a last-minute plea for leniency, even if they’d been condemned to die in the electric-chair at dawn. Greed and vanity and the lust for power fueled this commerce. And Allardyce, who’d worked the system for his own benefit, now found it had turned against him. Simply, his luck had run out.
‘You didn’t answer me, Joe. Why would anyone want to destroy you?’
‘I broke some rule. I done something wrong. I dunno what.’
‘Look it straight in the eye, Joe. Your last two pictures flopped. Nobody’s got it in for you. The box-office wheel just turned in the other direction. You misjudged the marketplace. And you can’t accept that.’
He stared at me, not seeing me. In his mind, he’d misjudged nothing. He preferred to construct a whole scenario of paranoia, people determined to finish him off. A freemasonry had blackballed him. Now they were after his blood. I wanted him to see that no such cartel existed. His last picture, Oasis on the Moon, had been a monster turkey, shown only once to the public.
I said, ‘You’re transferring your failures elsewhere. You’re saying they were caused by men who want to destroy you. This group, Joe – does it meet once a month? Does it spend hours thinking up new ways to weaken you? And where does it actually meet, do you ever wonder? In the function room of a hotel? In a chalet at the Château Marmont? In the projection-room of a mansion in Bel-Air?’
‘Maybe they communicate by phone,’ he said.
I pushed my chair back from my desk. I was looking down the slanting, crooked, dark corridors of his mind, and I felt sorry for him. I was trained to make sure my personal feelings didn’t slip through any tiny hole in the delicate net of the therapist-client relationship, but it happened. And lately it had been happening a little too often. I found myself feeling pity and sadness. I became despondent. I felt detachment erode, disinterest crumble. These were human beings, and they were broken, they were hurting – and I couldn’t treat them as if I were wearing latex gloves and they were lab cultures I didn’t dare touch for fear of contamination. Once again, I felt I needed a rest from all this. A time away. Maybe after the baby came, we’d head for Big Sur or the Pacific Northwest and take a long, long break.
The telephone on my desk rang. I picked up the handset.
‘You asked to be notified if anyone called from Washington,’ Jane said. ‘Well, they’re here, Jerry. In person.’
I checked my watch. ‘Have them wait a couple of minutes,’ I said.
‘They’re in a hurry,’ Jane said. ‘It’s urgent. They’ve got meetings in LA all day.’ She was keeping her voice under control, but I could tell she was quietly irritated; she regarded my sessions as sacrosanct and it wouldn’t have mattered to her if the President himself had strutted inside the office, she would still have been reluctant to patch him through.
‘I’ll buzz you in a minute, Jane.’ I put the phone down and looked at Allardyce. ‘Don’t think I’m a part of this conspiracy against you, Joe, but I need to cut this meeting short. Something’s come up. Don’t take it personally.’
‘Don’t take it personally, he tells me. Right. I take everything personally.’ He sighed long and deep.
I removed my prescription-pad from the middle drawer of my desk. I began to scribble with my fountain-pen. ‘I’m going to increase the dose of Norpramin.’
‘It better do some good,’ Allardyce said. He snatched the script from my desk and stuffed it in the breast pocket of his jacket without looking at it. ‘You want I should exit stage left as usual?’
‘Please,’ I said. I walked with him to the door that led directly to the elevators, my hand on his elbow. ‘Call me if the increased dosage doesn’t work.’
‘I’ll call all right.’
I held the door open for him. I looked into his eyes, which were sad. I felt a stab of pity for him again.
‘Make an appointment with Jane,’ I said.
‘Same time next week would suit me,’ he said. ‘Say, wasn’t that a vehicle for Alan Alda and Carol Burnett?’
‘Same Time Next Year,’ I answered.
‘Oh. Yeah. Right. See, I’m forgetting stuff.’ He walked to the door, stopped, looked back. ‘Hey hey, wait a minute. You’re wrong, Doctor Smartass. It was Ellen Burstyn, not Carol B.’
‘You sure?’
‘How long have I been in this business, huh?’
‘I could have sworn,’ I said.
‘Some stuff stays glued to the old memory scrap-books,’ he said. ‘I once had Alda lined up to make a movie for me … Fell through. What the hell. This shit biz.’
I watched him go in the direction of the elevators, back to a life where the silence of a telephone meant the end of the world. I wondered how much I could really help Joe Allardyce.
I walked to my desk and buzzed Jane. The door of my office opened almost immediately and Jane ushered two people inside. A plump, cheerful man flashed an ID card and introduced himself as James Brunton, a special investigator attached to the White House. The other visitor called herself Carrie Vasuu; she was blond and pretty in a sharp-edged way, dressed in a tight black skirt and matching double-breasted jacket. Her ID had been issued by the White House; a presidential aide. She and Brunton had bulky briefcases.
‘Short notice,’ Brunton said. ‘I apologize.’
Carrie Vasuu said, ‘Sometimes we have to do things in a hurry, Dr Lomax.’
‘Apparently,’ I said.
‘You’re unhappy with the intrusion,’ she said.
‘I’m less than delighted.’
‘We’ll be fast,’ Brunton said and smiled. ‘In and out. I promise you.’
I looked at my watch. ‘It’s about Emily Ford, I guess.’
‘Yep,’ Brunton said.
10.47 a.m.
They were in Los Angeles, as Brunton phrased it, ‘to tie up a few loose ends’, which involved going over a couple of things Emily Ford had discussed with senior presidential aides in Washington. The President, Brunton said, was ‘almost certain’ to nominate her for the position of Attorney-General.
‘Barring a skeleton in the closet,’ he added.
‘We’ve all got a few bones somewhere,’ I said. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like his smile, the cheerfulness that struck me as forced. He was a back-slapper, the kind of guy who forced drink on people at parties and pretended he was the spirit of generosity, dispensing largesse.
Carrie Vasuu, whose eyes were the blue of a Lapland summer sky, looked directly at me. ‘I’ll be straight,’ she said, in a way that suggested she was never straight with anyone. ‘The President doesn’t want Congress to bite him on this nomination. He’s had nominations rebuffed before and he doesn’t like the flack. So we’re here to check out a few things.’
I glanced at Carrie Vasuu’s long, suntanned legs. I couldn’t help myself. Her short, tight skirt was slut couture, and expensive.
‘Go ahead,’ I said.
Carrie Vasuu said, ‘We assume you’re aware of Ford’s position on crime – especially those crimes related to narcotics?’
‘I don’t keep up with what she says in public,’ I remarked.
‘You know she advocates mandatory prison sentences for the private use of recreational drugs –’
‘I’d heard,’ I said. ‘The Dragon Lady.’
Brunton smiled at me thinly. ‘Which riles some of our elected officials of a more liberal persuasion. Emily Ford is on record as saying that even a high-school kid caught with a single reefer should do time.’
‘I don’t believe everything I read, Ms Vasuu. In any case, I don’t see how this has anything to do with me. I’m not interested in her policies.’
Carrie Vasuu held a hand up, a cop stopping the flow of traffic. ‘Let me finish first, Dr Lomax. She’s also on record as favoring mandatory life sentences for dealers, no plea-bargaining. She claims too many lawyers are doing too many questionable deals with overworked DAs in smoky back rooms.’ She took a folder from her briefcase, opened it, and read from a notebook. ‘Let me quote her, Doctor. This is from an interview that appeared in the LA Examiner: “Too many bad guys are walking free, or they’re serving Disneyworld sentences, twelve months and three off for good behavior. Everybody knows the system needs to be totally revamped. I want an America that’s free of dope dealers. I want the streets swept clean.” End of quote.’
‘I still don’t see where I come into this,’ I said. But I did. I knew where it was leading. ‘So far as I can tell, she’s only echoing what a lot of people feel in this country: Dope pushers shouldn’t be able to do deals with prosecutors. They ought to expect punishment.’
Carrie Vasuu asked, ‘Is that your own view too, Dr Lomax?’
I shook my head. ‘No. I don’t think you can impose mandatory life sentences willy-nilly. Every case is different.’
She had found more papers and was glancing at them. ‘Here’s some of Ford’s wish-list: More federal and state prisons, more prison guards. Border patrol increased by thirty to forty per cent. Another one hundred thousand policemen nationwide. A multi-million dollar Organized Crime Task Force controlled by the Attorney-General, with the emphasis on combatting drug trafficking. Special investigators answerable only to the AG … it amounts to a private fiefdom, it makes her damn near unaccountable. She can yank up the drawbridge of her little castle any time she doesn’t like the sound of the rabble outside. A lot of people in Congress are going to find her desire to build her own domain a problem.’
‘Which leaves the President high and dry if her nomination’s a failure,’ I said.
‘It sure does,’ Carrie Vasuu said. ‘Some people in the President’s own party … well, they feel he’s made an enormous mistake with Emily Ford. They think it’s a knee-jerk reaction to the anti-drug voices that come from certain pockets of the populace, Dr Lomax. Rabid voices.’
‘But voters all the same,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ she replied. ‘The Christian Coalition, the Baptists, the Mormons, the plain old Bible Belters – they all mark their ballots. I’m not espousing drugs, and I’m not indulging the drug culture we have in this country, but some influential people in the party believe you cannot have the kind of laws Emily Ford wants, because in the end they just don’t work. They remember Prohibition.’
Brunton coughed into his rolled-up fist. ‘I’d like to move on into other areas. More personal ones.’
I’d been waiting for this shift. This was why they were here in my office.
Brunton said, ‘I’m looking for anything that might embarrass her if it became public knowledge.’
I said, ‘Embarrass the President, you mean.’
‘If you like,’ Carrie Vasuu said, and took from her briefcase a loose-leaf binder with a red cover. She flicked a couple of pages. ‘She came to see you soon after the unfortunate matter of her parents, I believe.’
