“He also told Eileen that he’d lost his folks in a plane crash in the Alps in Europe and that their bodies were never found.”
“Out with hillbilly feuds,” I said.
“For a fact,” he agreed. “He lives in a mansion now. He didn’t when he lived with Eileen, but they didn’t live poor.”
“Where’d he get his money?”
“I’m still digging into that. I’ve unearthed his millions in stocks, bonds, mutual funds. Trouble is, where’d he get the seed money in the first place?”
“Did Eileen have a clue?”
“Insurance from the plane crash.”
“We know that’s not true. What’s with his two academic jobs?”
“Up-and-up. Not a bad mark on his record. His students like him. The girls, especially.”
“Which leads us to his sex life?”
“Cold as a mackerel, Eileen said. Too fastidious.”
“Yet he strips?”
“Stripped. Years ago.”
“Have you come across a place called The Cloisters?”
“Yeah,” he answered vaguely.
“Whitney’s a regular. An owner maybe?”
Bellan shook his head. “Being ex-cops, you and I both know these joints are owned and controlled by a very few—um—entrepreneurs. They’re not your Fortune Five Hundred crowd, and they guard their territory like mama alligators on the nest.”
“There’s ways to unhide ownership.”
Shaking his head, Bellan said, “That’s as far as I go for now.”
“Let me get this straight. For five grand you gave Eileen the sketchy details of a past life. Fifteen grand has to buy a lot more. Give me a hint.”
His moustache climbed up his cheeks and circled his nose again. “Let’s talk about Palm Springs. Convince me why I should go there.”
I told the story, more or less, as it happened.
“You got amnesia?” He frowned.
“Temporary. I’m back to being me.”
“You telling me straight?”
“You can take it to the bank.”
32
I live in Peachtree Hills. When I got to my street, I spotted Lake cruising south on Peachtree Street. He honked and waved with a grin that could melt ice in Antarctica. He made a U-ey, followed me, and pulled into my driveway. I sat in my car for a long moment. I knew my day would come down to this.
I’d planned to call him tomorrow, tell him about Bellan Thomas, ask him to verify the PI’s bona fides. I opened my car door. He walked up the drive to the back gate. He’d shaved but that didn’t make him appear less haggard. “What’s cooking on Peachtree Street?” I asked, moving toward him. “Somebody jump off the Darlington?”
“How are you, Dru?”
His physical presence made my heart feel like a balloon full of helium. “I’m good. And you, Lieutenant Lake?”
“Lake. Just Lake.” His dug both hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders forward.
“I was about to call,” I said. “Come inside?”
He walked through the gate into the back yard. I closed and padlocked the gate. I’d gotten careful since I’d glimpsed a Chevy Caprice a couple of times. Maybe my imagination—not a rare breed of car. Lake went to the concrete birdbath and scratched Mr. Brown’s ear. Mr. Brown jumped down and wound himself around Lake’s legs. The skin of a chipmunk lay in the birdbath bowl. “I see you had supper already,” Lake said, and scratched the cat under the chin. I crossed my arms and felt a warm breeze sweep my skin. Lake seemed about to speak, then closed his mouth as if afraid to blunder into a verbal morass.
I led him inside and punched the numbers on the alarm’s keypad. “Good to see you locking up these days,” Lake said.
“Comes from chasing chimeras.” He looked away, not going near that one. I slipped my bag from my shoulder and threw it on the kitchen table. “I’m having a G and T, but not with Blue Sapphire.” I went to the cabinet to get out the fixings.
“Got any beer?”
I used to keep it for him. “The liquor store’s only a half mile up Peachtree,” I said.
“G and T it is.”
We sat across from each other at the stout oak table, our drinks on cocktail napkins, my nervous system whacked-out. But I steeled myself against his brooding gaze.
“I guess—I have to begin somewhere,” he said.
“If you want me to, I will,” I said, sipping my drink.
His eyelids blinked back tender pain. “Sure.”
“I had an interesting visitor this afternoon.”
The lines around his eyes eased. “Anyone I know?”
“Not unless you know a PI named Bellan Thomas.”
He shook his head. “I thought I knew them all.”
“He’s from Birmingham. He was hired by Eileen Cameron to dig up dirt on Bradley.”
His eyes widened at the news. “Smart girl, hiring from outside Atlanta.”
“I want to know more about Bellan Thomas. You got any contacts in Birmingham?”
“I got contacts everywhere.” As a cop, if he didn’t, he could get them quick.
As I related Bellan’s story, Lake curved his long, fit body into a more comfortable position. When I told him about the bargain I made, he sat forward, obviously dubious. He said, “I’d need to know more about this character before I’d go trusting him.”
“That’s why I’ve asked you to dig into his background.”
“You think what he’s holding back is that important?”
“Important enough to cost Eileen fifteen grand.”
“Killers hire out to murder an entire city block for less than that.”
“There’s that, too.”
He scratched the side of his neck. “Seems certain, Eileen’s dead.” I didn’t mouth any of the sarcasms that occurred to me, and he continued, “I got to wonder if Whitney knew this guy was on his tail?”
“What do you want to bet he did?”
He placed the cocktail glass carefully on the table, rose, and dragged his chair close to me. He reached for both my hands and held them. “I’m glad to see you’ve got your enthusiasm back. It looks good on you.”
“Feels good,” I said, looking at his hands clutching mine.
“Susanna misses you,” he said in a voice so sweet I felt like an ice cream cone on a hot summer afternoon.
“I miss her,” I said, barely hearing my voice.
He lifted my chin. “We both miss you.” I kept my eyes very still and relished this snapshot of a moment. He said, “I’d like you to come with us to the park Sunday.”
Susanna’s beatific face rose in my mind. “If I can,” I said, hoping he couldn’t hear my heart jamming like a rocker on stage.
“Sunday’s a day of rest,” he murmured, stroking my arm. “We both need a day of rest, and Susanna needs to see you. I think some of my worry has rubbed off on her.”
“Your worry?”
“I’ve been concerned, Dru.”
I couldn’t control the tremble in my bottom lip. “About what?”
“I know you’re physically healed, but—”
“But not mentally,” I said, the muscles in my neck tightening.
“I don’t mean that,” he said, his fingers sliding between mine. “I mean spiritually.”
“Has the great mystic come to give me that divine message?”
“Don’t make fun of me,” he said and leaned away from me. “I’m not as smart as you. I can’t match wits with you.”
Oh Christ, I thought. What in the hell is wrong with me? I laid my hand on his knee. “I’m sorry.” I held my breath and looked into his face, now deflated, anxiety tugging his skin. “I feel like a prickly cactus. Maybe that’s the desert’s legacy. I can’t shake the dreads. I’m nervous all the time, like my insides are ready to pop from my skin.” I was talking too freely; I hadn’t meant to confide my feelings, which were too chaotic even for me to understand. “We’ll go to the park Sunday. Susanna will be a comfort.”
At the door, Lake hugged my bowstring of a body and raised my chin. “I’ll find out about your PI. Maybe he’s the break we need.”
We?
I tried to breathe past my heart, now in my throat.
33
The next day I began in earnest to investigate Bradley Dewart Whitney.
Curriculum Paradigms, Inc., was located in an industrial park in Alpharetta off Old Milton Parkway. Naturally I parked on the wrong side of the building and had to walk around the rectangular, two-story to get to suite 102. All the offices had identical vertical blinds. Some were opened, some closed. Many had “Laboratories” in their names. Secrets going on, I supposed.
Curriculum’s blinds were open, and I went in. The clock on the receptionist’s desk told me it was ten o’clock. No other items on the desk, nor a receptionist sitting in the chair behind it. The coffee on somewhere smelled as if it had been boiling down since yesterday. Despite that, the anteroom was as sterile as a lab—white walls, white furniture. The only color was a National Geographic magazine that lay on a white table.
A wispy-haired man came out of an office, evidently to see who had wandered unexpectedly into his parlor. He was short and thin and middle-aged, and altogether nondescript. An invisible, colorless man. An academic to his eyeballs. He looked perplexed, as if he couldn’t figure out what I was doing here. “You lost?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “This is Curriculum Paradigms, Inc., isn’t it?”
Still skeptical, he said, “Yessss. Er . . . can I be of any assistance? I am, at present, the only staff member here. I am Dr. Brommer.”
I held out my hand. “Dr. Brommer. Are you the director here?”
“I am that.”
“Then you can help me,” I said, taking out my leather identification wallet and handing it to him. “I’m from Child Trace. I look for missing children.”
He looked at the ID. He looked at me. “Yes, I see,” he said.
“You have an employee here, a Mr. Bradley Whitney?”
“Dr. Bradley Whitney. Yes.”
“I’m investigating the disappearance of his ex-wife and child.”
“Oh,” he said, shaking his head. “So sad, yes. So sad. These things . . .” He stepped back, and waved vaguely toward his office. “Come this way.”
His office was in keeping with the sterile outer office. He sat behind a Swedish modern desk, and I took a seat opposite him. His face was imprecisely kind. He said, “Miss Dru, I would like to help you, but . . .”
“I’m sure you would. Any little thing you can remember, you never know, it can help.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t learn anything to remember.”
“I need to ask you about Dr. Whitney.” He blinked as if I’d spoken Russian. “Hopefully, you can help me out in that regard.”
His eyes slid past my right shoulder. “Well, I don’t know that I know much.”
“Let’s start with how long he’s worked here?”
“Well,” he scratched his shallow chin. “That would be about six years.”
“How did he get the job? How does one get a job writing aptitude tests?”
“Well, by applying, of course.”
How stupid of me.
Before I could reply, he said, “That wasn’t very specific, was it?” I smiled enough to show him dimples. “Well, you are not quite correct when you say that Mr. Whitney wrote aptitude tests. Mr. Whitney is a scientist.”
It was my turn to look perplexed. “What kind of scientist?”
“We at Curriculum Paradigms, Inc., analyze data collected along lines of inquiry.”
“What kind of inquiry?”
He seemed to forbear that he must expound. “The nature of our inquiries are on linguistic divisions irregular in unalienable linguistic divisions.” He lost me and continued his high-blown linguistics until he came to the end. “Such is the nature of relative protocol.”
“And Dr. Whitney is addressing this relative protocol?”
“Yes, to the extent that will afford the challenging facets of the underachieving pupil in context with nonalignment . . .”
My head reeled. “But that brings me back to my question: how does one get this job?”
The word job seemed to startle him. “Dr. Whitney is a genius. We recruited him while he was in college. His work in urban studies is exemplary. Quite outstanding.”
“He teaches at Georgia State.”
“He is excellent in the classroom—a quality that not all academics possess.” He seemed to imply that perhaps he lacked this quality.
“How well do you know Dr. Whitney personally?”
He thought a moment. “He is a colleague. That is about all I can say. We have not associated socially.”
“Does he associate socially with any of his colleagues here?”
“I do not believe so. Although we are a laboratory, and we share our findings, we work independently of one another. The scientists work alone, collecting their data, interpreting it, etcetera”
I joked, “No gathering around the old water cooler to talk football and wives and kiddies.”
He laughed half-heartedly. “Our scientists hardly ever come here. They work at home; often they have related occupations like Dr. Whitney.”
“Does the job pay much?”
He acted like I’d burped. “Excuse me?”
“What’s the salary range for someone who does what Dr. Whitney does?”
“Salary?” That old demon coin of the realm. “That information, of course, is confidential.”
“Let me ask you this: would he ever be in a position here to earn more than say two hundred thousand a year?”
He looked like he wanted to laugh out loud, but his face only lightened. “That would be a challenge even Dr. Whitney would find daunting.”
He’d told me more than he thought he had. He knew Whitney a lot better than he was letting on.
34
Georgia State University is an urban campus, founded in 1913 by the Georgia Institute of Technology as “the evening school of commerce.” For decades, it had been a school noted for nonprofessional certification and competed with community colleges around the counties. Students worked during the day, and then took Marta—Atlanta’s rapid transit system—to their night classes. Then GSU’s status blossomed when Atlanta grew internationally and, as a consequence, the demand for a reasonably priced education did, too.
Bradley Whitney possessed a master’s degree in urban policy studies and a PhD in educational policy studies. He officed on the fifth floor of the Educational Policy Studies building. Although it was lunchtime, I took a chance he’d be around. He wasn’t in the classroom, so I found his office. I stood in the doorway and listened while he waved a sandwich in one hand and lectured an enthralled group of eighteen to twenty students who had crowded into the large room. Most were women.
He paced and said, “Educators are trapped in divergent schema. On the one hand they are asked to sanction all students’ achievements. But, they are also asked to guarantee that apprentices expand and gain equal access to indistinguishable instructive probabilities.”
He hadn’t looked my way, but I thought he spoke to me.
He was saying, “Mobility theorists see the intellectual cream expanding in endowment, talent, and labor. Reproduction theorists think that capitalistic civilization is menacing enough to stratify and quash itself to satisfy the demand for dutiful and consenting human resources.”
His head turned, and he narrowed arrogant eyes at me. “I think there’s another chair for a passing student hanging on my every word.” The besotted laughed in unison. I twinkled fingers at them and went to lean against bookshelf.
Whitney went on like that for another fifteen minutes. I wondered how many ways you can say that the culturally disadvantaged are preyed upon by society. Countless ways, it seemed.
Eventually Whitney wound down and told his listeners that he’d answer their questions formally in class in an
hour. They slowly trudged out, making jokes with him as they left. The girls thrust their boobs out more than was natural, and giggled when he bestowed a special smile or word on them.
Once we were alone, Whitney closed the door, picked up an apple from his desk, bounced it in his hand, and said, “An apple for the teacher. I never took an apple to my teachers. My mother thought it was too terribly gauche. Think of the irony.” He slammed the apple into a wastebasket. “Sick of the damned things. You here for a reason?”
“I’m back on the case,” I said, “and I’m back investigating everyone who has ever heard the name of Eileen Whitney Cameron.”
It was hard to read his mannerisms, so maybe I just imagined that he was acutely pissed. After the pause, he said, “That’s good to know. I’ve still got some credit on my fee advance—to my way of thinking. So check away. I’ve nothing to hide.”
“Let’s start with your résumé. Will you provide me with a copy?”
“My résumé?”
“Sure, you know that piece of paper that makes you out to be a genius, overlooking the lesser failings like getting fired, or—”
“Excuse me? I can assure you I’ve never been fired.”
“I’m not speaking of you in particular.”
He smirked. “You speaking about your own résumé?”
“I wish I were as good as what I’ve written down.”
“Well,” he said, looking smug, “I am.”
“Then you won’t mind if I have a peek.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Where you’re from. Where you went to high school.”
“Is that stuff on résumés?”
“Should be. Marital status, birthplace.”
“What about race, religion, gender, weight, height?”
“Not those. But hobbies, maybe. Employers like to know how well rounded you are, what you do in your spare time. You got any interesting hobbies?”
His eyebrows drew so close to each other they formed a straight line across his eyes. I wondered if he was pondering The Cloisters.
He said, “I play golf whenever I get the chance. It helps if you’re in the business world, but actually, in academia, it’s considered mundane.”
The Last Temptation Page 15
