Deadline, page 8
It was a lock of hair the color of aubergine.
I stared at it. I raised it to my face. It smelled of Sondra. In different circumstances and another age, the hair might have been a token of love to be enclosed in a locket.
The Pontiac came back again, braking halfway up on the sidewalk. The passenger door was thrown open and I found myself looking into the curiously bland face of a fair-haired man in a blue denim shirt. A second man emerged quickly from the passenger side. He was large-skulled, hair-cropped as short and sharp as new-mown Bermuda grass. Large eyes protruded from his head like a couple of ping-pong balls cut in half and placed in each socket. He gripped my shoulder and pushed me against the car.
The fair-haired man slipped on a set of brass knuckles and rubbed them against my chin. A silver and turquoise bracelet hung at his wrist. He smiled. ‘A word of advice, Lomax … Do yourself a favor, give the man what he wants. Or it’s gonna get real hairy. I promise you.’
I couldn’t help saying, ‘Fuck you.’
The fair-haired guy brought his face so close to mine the motion might have been a preamble to a kiss. His breath smelled of cow-slurry. ‘What am I hearing?’
‘Simple. I said, “Fuck you.”’ I felt a tightness in my chest. I didn’t need to alienate this pair, but I couldn’t blunt the sharp antagonism I felt, the awareness of outrage. One more push and the dam of myself would crack.
The big-skulled guy said to his associate, ‘You want me to kick the living crap outta him?’
The other man said, ‘Yeah, I’d like that. Except it wasn’t no part of the job-description.’ He rubbed my chin with the brass knuckles again, a circular motion, slow and menacing. I could have pulled my face away, but I didn’t. I wasn’t going to be stared down either.
‘You think you got huevos, buddy,’ he said. ‘Doncha?’
‘Yeah, that’s what he thinks,’ said the big-skulled one. ‘But is he smart enough to keep them getting all fucking scrambled into an omelet?’ He made a crushing gesture with his huge hands, as if he were pulverizing a couple of stone orbs. ‘Crunchy crunchy, crunch crunch. Here’s your balls in a blender, Lomax. You smart enough to save yourself from that fate, huh?’
The man with the sour breath said, ‘Just do what you been told to do, doc. Don’t take no detours. Listen to me. Be obedient. And don’t play tough guy, because it don’t impress me and my friend here. OK? Whatever you can do, we can do a whole lot better.’
So: it wasn’t enough that Sondra was being held captive; I needed extra pressure too.
I heard them drive away. One of them shouted, ‘Keep what we said in mind, doc,’ and I sensed the world darkening around me and something half-visible vibrating on the edges of my vision.
3.27 p.m.
The hair had shocked me, sent me into a deeper downward spiral. And the appearance of the two men had given the situation a hard reality it had lacked before. Finally there were faces, belligerent and cunning, behind the abduction of my wife. Real people – more than a disembodied voice at the end of a phone.
Give the man what he wants.
I sat in my office in front of the keyboard. I struck the keys hard and sweat ran down my face. I tried to remember the sessions I’d had with Emily, the areas we’d explored; my memory kept shorting out, dates escaped me, particulars of our interviews, those concrete details that would give a sense of indisputable reality to the counterfeit. This had to be convincing beyond all doubt, but I felt like a man forging a document the original of which had been lost, or somebody applying chemicals to a brand-new parchment to make it look and feel antique. Solvents, dyes, toxic substances.
I had the feeling the formula was eluding me, that I’d end up with nothing credible. This wasn’t going to fool anyone. And then there would be repercussions I didn’t want to think about.
The letters on the screen blurred as I pounded … the subject expressed great concern over the limitations of justice … the subject wondered if she might have gone into a different profession, and believed that she’d developed a scepticism about the practice of law …
… She is obsessed with the burdensome influence her father had on her life, his intellectual bullying …
… He was constantly hypercritical of her in childhood …
… She was often the target of his anger …
… His personality dominated the family. When she qualified as a lawyer, a serious competitive edge entered their relationship … In my opinion, her feelings for her father fitted the classic love-hate matrix … perhaps with more hate than love…
… My judgment is that although his death was a tragedy for her, she feels an unconscious relief that he can no longer pressure her. This induces feelings of guilt … She wishes she had been able to settle the differences between herself and her father before he was killed, and now that the opportunity to do so is no longer available to her, she feels even more guilt…
… I have taken her off Serax and prescribed 4mg daily of Ativan for anxiety. The effects of Serax were too short-lived …
I typed and typed faster than I’d ever done in my life. I fudged the dates and times. I couldn’t remember them with any precision, anyway. Then I wondered if I should mention our hypnosis session, at least in passing – but no, I didn’t want to introduce that into the report. For reasons of authenticity, I might have done: but I couldn’t. I walked round the office, thinking, trying to remember. There was gridlock inside my head, a pile-up of stalled thoughts.
I’d placed the lock of Sondra’s hair beside the keyboard, and now I picked it up and caressed it between thumb and forefinger. I had to sit down and type more, harder, churn out the words, keep them coming. I knew the telephone would ring soon enough.
And it did.
‘Santa Monica, Lomax,’ he said. ‘The pier. Go there now. Bring the file and your phone. You’ll be contacted … and do us all a favor by staying away from Emily Ford. You got that?’
They’re following me, I thought. They saw me go inside Otto’s, saw me walk Emily Ford to her car. I wondered about the surveillance, when it had begun, and the extent of it. I felt a tiny shadow cross my mind, such as a genuine paranoiac might feel: I sensed unseen faces behind the sun-glossed windows of parked cars, I wondered about a guy standing at a bar with an absent expression, a woman sucking an ice-cream cone on a street-corner, a face in a phonebooth – everything was charged, everything loaded, with the menace of the invisible observer. I might have been the subject of a lab experiment, shunted through a maze, my movements charted and recorded.
‘What did you talk to her about anyway, Lomax?’
‘This and that.’ I stared at the screen. I still hadn’t written enough; I had eight pages. Jesus. Eight pages was nothing. I needed double that. I needed length, density, an infusion of technical jargon.
‘Don’t give me “this and that,”’ he said. ‘You just had to tell her somebody wanted her file, right? Feel free to stop me if I’m wrong, Lomax. You and she tossed a few names back and forth, candidates who might want her psychiatric records, scoundrels with underhand motives. You wanted her to know that somebody’s looking for a way to crucify her. You still feel a responsibility towards her. Dare I say a fondness, even? Or is that simply speculation?’
I didn’t respond. A note in his voice scared me: supreme authority. I have your wife and I own you. You obey every command I issue. How could I even consider the idea of telling this voice that the records he demanded had been stolen, for God’s sake?
He said, ‘I’ll say this for the last time, Lomax. You’re alone. You don’t have any allies. You don’t have friends, you don’t even have acquaintances. The universe you live in is very big and very empty. There is no God. Like it or not, I’m your best friend. Understand? Say so.’
‘OK, I understand,’ I said. ‘Incidentally, I’m not enamored of your friends –’
‘Get used to them. They’re never very far away from you. You might even say they’re more close to you than anyone else in this situation, including moi. Their manners leave something to be desired, but they were raised in bad neighborhoods, underprivileged, alcoholic homes, abusive fathers, you know how it goes, bla bla … Now, if Ford calls you, or contacts you in person, tell her you’ve come to the conclusion that the “kidnapper” was just some loony, some kind of phone-freak playing with your head, and that your wife’s OK. Say something like … she had to go out of town on business. It was unexpected. OK?’
I said OK. I was tense. I scanned the screen, the words I’d written. I felt my heart drop and go on dropping, a stone down a well. He was never going to buy this half-assed mock-up. He’d see through it like a transparency. He didn’t sound like a stupid man.
He was quiet for a moment. ‘By the way. Get the hair?’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘You should be grateful. Considering.’
Considering what? Considering what I might have received in that envelope? I had images of butchery, dismemberment. I shoved the pictures away. My saliva felt like silt in my throat.
‘I want to speak to my wife,’ I said.
‘You speak to her when I decide, and only then,’ he answered. ‘Now go to the pier.’ And he hung up.
I sat down, hammered out a few last sentences, then printed up what I’d written. Dear Christ, it was as thin as consommé. But I didn’t have time to embellish or expand it. Eight pages, double-spaced in Univers Condensed 12 point. It didn’t feel right.
The paper looked and smelled too new, that was it.
I rummaged in a closet in search of some old paper and found a box that had been opened a while back; I took some of these sheets and stuck them inside the printer, then I printed the file again. Better, but not much.
I slipped the pages inside a manila envelope and licked the gummed flap and sealed the thing shut.
Then I brought up on-screen the file that contained the names of my patients. Attaching it to an e-mail, I sent it to Emily Ford, with the message: I’ll contact you. After I’d sent it, I wondered if my computer was secure, or if my electronic mail was being illicitly monitored.
I picked up the lock of Sondra’s hair and stuck it in the breast pocket of my jacket, as if for luck. I passed Jane Steel on my way out. She was updating computer data: housecleaning, she called it. Making copies. Deleting out-of-date material.
‘I may not be back today,’ I said.
She gazed at me. Her mouth had a slight downward twist that suggested concern. ‘Is there anything you want me to do?’
‘If I can think of anything, I’ll call.’
‘Take care,’ she said.
‘I’ll do my best, Jane.’
4.29 p.m.
In Santa Monica I parked a couple of blocks from the pier, then I walked past the carousel and the hot-dog concessions. The tide rose and fell sluggishly against the pilings. I’d come here with Sondra on our second date, and I remembered, with a measure of pain, the slow-running calm of the ocean, the first kiss, the first connection, that almost unbearable contact of flesh, my hand on her naked breast beneath her white cotton shirt. The image shimmered, the water slipped over the sands beneath the pier.
I remembered telling her, with brazen certainty, that I was falling in love with her. She’d laughed lightly, a little surprised. Do you usually give your heart away this fast? she’d asked. No, I’d never committed myself so quickly to anything before, but I’d known that it was right to tell her what I felt. I was like an adolescent afflicted by love’s first assault. I trembled even now to think of that intimacy.
A dozen sailboats moved listlessly about half a mile from shore. A distant freighter plumed the air with dense brown smoke that rose into the sun. Two freckled, red-haired kids, probably brothers, carried fishing-poles towards the end of the pier. I’d fished creeks around Buffalo as a boy. I remembered nylon and reel and float and the splash of a hooked fish breaking the surface. I could almost hear it now. A lost world, innocence capsized. I thought of the route my life had taken, and how it had turned suddenly into a series of fiendish switchbacks.
What was I supposed to do now? Wait for somebody to contact me? Or was this a dry run that had been devised, a chance for me to prove that I’d come to the designated place alone? My senses had altered. The disappearance of Sondra had colored everything. I ached for her. I might have lost a limb. Or the will to live. My goals – but I couldn’t recollect specific goals. What had I wanted, anyway? A different car, a house in a quiet place out of the city, my office refurbished, walls painted? God knows, none of it seemed of any importance now.
I touched the lock of her hair in my breast pocket, and pictured the battered Pontiac from which the envelope had been tossed. I could have described the two men easily, but I couldn’t recall the license number, because my attention had been focused on the idea of violence and the way sun glimmered on the ugly brass knuckles. I should have been more alert, but my first impulse had been fear, the idea that somebody was going to shoot me down on the sidewalk in cold blood; you don’t think straight in these situations, you don’t look for peripheral details –
I reached the end of the pier. I checked the people strolling in the afternoon sun. Couples, solitary men and women, some teenagers, two old guys playing chess on a bench with a miniature set. The air smelled of brine and something else, a scent like that of dead fish. The ocean was polluted. I sat down, my back to the sun, the crisp manila envelope on my lap. I felt like a student whose final exam lay in that envelope, and whose whole future depended on this paper receiving a high grade. An A, a B-plus. A simple Pass would be enough.
When my phone rang I took it out of my pocket immediately.
‘You’re on the pier,’ he said. ‘I can see you.’
I turned my head, looked the length of the pier, back through the entrance as far as the avenue that ran parallel with the beach.
‘You’re wasting your time, Lomax,’ he said. ‘You can’t see me.’
Was he in one of the white-faced buildings on the far side of the avenue? Or was he closer than that, standing in a concealed place on the pier itself? The thought struck me that maybe he was offshore, a passenger in one of the yachts, a guy with binoculars or a telescope.
‘Get up, start walking,’ he said. ‘There’s a trash-can on your right just as you step off the pier. Drop the envelope in the can. Got that?’
‘I’ve got it,’ I said.
‘Then you go to your car and you drive away,’ he said. ‘If anyone impedes the person picking up the envelope from the can, if you’ve brought anyone with you as back-up, if a single goddam thing goes wrong, the consequences are on your head. I hope I’m making myself plain.’
‘Plain as day,’ I said. ‘When do I get my wife back?’
‘You’ll hear from me.’
And the line was cut.
I walked towards the exit. A flock of black-headed gulls flew overhead, shrieking. Ten yards from the trash-can stood a couple of homeless characters, a barefoot guy in an old plaid poncho, and a skinny waif of a teenage girl with a tie-dyed bedsheet drawn around her shoulders. She had matted hair and gazed at me pleadingly, holding a hand out for change. She smelled of unwashed flesh, and she was shivering.
‘Got a quarter, mister? Fifty cents? Please?’
‘Sure,’ and I fished out a bunch of coins, dropped them in her palm.
‘Thanks a lot,’ she said in a plaintive little voice.
Then I wondered: how did this transaction look to the man observing me? Might he interpret my contact with the girl as a sign? Might he think that this thin urchin was an undercover cop and the guy in the poncho her partner, and that I’d just imparted vital information, passed on a prearranged signal? An innocent gesture, coins dropped in the dirty palm of a wasted young woman – but how did I know he’d see it that way? I didn’t. But the notion had a reverse side: how did I know that the pair weren’t the kidnapper’s people, his gophers, messengers, part of his scheme?
I was crushed by questions. And no answers.
I dropped the envelope into the trash-can surreptitiously. I glimpsed a half-eaten burger, alive with buzzing flies, and a condom wrapper. I kept moving. I was nervous, and curious to turn my head, but I didn’t look back. Would the file convince? It had to, otherwise I was lost, everything was lost.
I reached my car, drove away. I kept an eye on the rearview mirror. How could you know if you were being followed in a world filled with traffic flowing endlessly? You couldn’t. It was an effective trick of one person tracking another: you didn’t have to be a constant watcher, you only needed to plant a single seed. The victim’s troubled imagination did the rest, imbuing the follower with omniscience. Or maybe in the mind of the hunted the follower was multiplied – one, two, four, eight, a platoon, a whole goddam battalion.
I knew all this, I knew how easy it was to succumb to paranoia. I knew it, sure, but that didn’t make it any easier to overcome.
My head felt like a pod about to burst open.
I wondered where they’d seized Sondra. Maybe she’d been snatched at a Stop sign, her door jerked open, hands grabbing for her, a chloroformed handkerchief. But she always drove with her doors locked. Unless something had persuaded her to unlock the car and step out, a rigged accident, say, or a vehicle blocking her way. I thought of the gloomy parking garage at LaBrea Records, another possibility. I wondered if her car was parked there, if she’d been abducted at her place of work.
I passed the park on the bluff that overlooked the Pacific. The homeless congregated here with their shopping-trolleys and kids whizzed past on skateboards and people threw Frisbees for their dogs. I chewed on my thumbnail so hard I gnawed it down to the quick, drawing a little blood.
I turned right off Ocean Avenue. I glanced at a surfboard sales and repair shop, and a tea-room that was a replica of something you might find in an idealized English village – scones and clotted cream and pictures of royalty. I had the impression these places were unreal. They were movie sets. This entire city existed only in some movie-maker’s mind. Fake knives. Fake patients.
