“What do you think of this?” she asked, handing me a cantaloupe. “Too firm to be ripe?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Just right, huh?” Big grin, one leg bent and resting against the other. She stretched and the T-shirt rose up, exposing a flat, bronze tummy.
I turned the melon in my palms and knocked on it a couple of times. “Just right.” When I handed it back, our fingers touched.
“I’m Julie.”
“Alex.”
“I’ve seen you here before, Alex. You buy lots of Chinese vegetables, don’t you?”
A shot in the dark—and a miss—but why make her feel bad? “Sure do.”
“Love that bok choy,” she said as she hefted the cantaloupe. Placing it in her basket, she turned her attention to half a pineapple wrapped in plastic. “Mmm, everything looks so good and ripe today. Yum.”
I bagged some tomatoes, selected a head of lettuce and a bunch of scallions, and began to wheel away.
“Lawyer, right?”
I smiled and shook my head.
“Um, let’s see … architect.”
“No, I’m a psychologist.”
“Are you really? I love psychologists. Mine helped me so much.”
“That’s great, Julie.” I began pushing my cart away. “Nice meeting you.”
“Listen,” she said. “I’m on this one-meal-a-day cleansing diet, just lunch—lots of complex carbohydrates—and I haven’t had it yet. I’m famished. There’s a pasta bar up the block. Would you care to join me?”
“Love to, Julie, but I can’t. Thanks, though.”
She waited for me to make a move. When I didn’t, her face fell.
“Nothing personal,” I said. “It’s just a bad time.”
“Sure,” she said, and snapped her head away. As I left I heard her mutter, “All the cute ones are faggots.”
At six Milo came by. Despite the fact that he wasn’t due back at the station until Monday, he was dressed for work—wilted seersucker suit, wash-and-wear shirt, atrocious tie, desert boots.
“Spent all day detecting,” he said, after getting himself a beer and remarking that I was a good boy for restocking my cupboards. “Hollywood Division, the coroner’s, Hall of Records, Building and Safety. Your lady doc’s a goddam phantom. I’d sure love to know what the hell’s going on.”
He sat down at the kitchen table. I settled across from him and waited for him to finish the beer.
“It’s as if she never was processed through anyone’s system,” he said. “I had to skulk around at Hollywood, pretend to be looking at something else while I checked for any file on her. Nothing. Not on paper or in the central computer. I couldn’t even find out who put the call in the night she died, or who took it. Zilch at the coroner’s, too—no autopsy report, no cold-storage log, death certificate, release. I mean, there’s cover-up and there’s cover-up but this is twilight zone stuff.”
He rubbed his hand over his face.
“One of the pathologists,” he said, “is a guy Rick knew in med school. Usually I can get him to talk to me off the record, give me results before he writes up the final report, speculate about stuff that he can’t put into writing. I thought he’d at least get me a copy of the report. No way. He made a big deal out of showing me there was no report, made it clear I shouldn’t ask for any favors on this one.”
“Same pathologist Del spoke to?”
“No. That was Itatani. I talked to him first, and it was the same thing. The fix has come down hard and heavy on this one. I confess to being intrigued.”
“Maybe it wasn’t suicide.”
“Any reason to think that?”
“She made lots of people angry.”
“Such as?”
I told him about the patient seductions, keeping Leslie Weingarden’s name out of it.
“Beautiful, Alex. Why didn’t you let me know about this in the first place?”
“Confidential source. I can’t give you any more details.”
“Jesus.” He got up, walked around, sat back down. “You ask me to dig you a hole, but won’t give me a shovel. Jesus, Alex.” He went to get another beer. “It’s bad enough being back in Realityville, without spinning my wheels all day.”
“I didn’t mean to send you on a wild-goose chase.”
“Honk honk.”
Then he waved his hand. “Nah, who am I kidding—I didn’t do it for you. I did it for myself. Trapp. And I still don’t think there’s any big whodunit here. Ransom killed herself. She was a maladjust—what you just told me corroborates that.”
Out on the ledge. I nodded. “Find out anything about the twin sister?”
“Nada. Another phantom. No Shirlee Ransom in any of our files or anyone else’s. If you came up with the name of that hospital you saw her at, we could search the business transfer and bankruptcy files. But even then, tracing individual patients would be a very long shot.”
“I can’t come up with it, because I never knew it, Milo. What about checking the Medi-Cal files?”
“You said Ransom was rich. Why would her sister be on Medi-Cal?”
“The parents were rich, but that was years ago. Money runs out. Also …”
“Also,” he said, “with all the lying she did, you don’t know what to believe.”
I nodded.
“Lie she did, pal. Like about owning the Jalmia house. The place is deeded to a corporation, just like the real estate agent said. A management company named Western Properties that’s owned by a holding company that’s owned by a savings-and-loan that’s owned by the Magna Corporation. I think that’s where it ends, but I wouldn’t swear to it.”
“Magna,” I said. “Isn’t that Leland Belding’s company?”
“Was till he died. No idea who owns it now.” He drank beer. “The old basket-case billionaire himself. Now a guy like that you could see putting on a big fix. But he’s been buried for … what? Fifteen years?”
“Something like that. Wasn’t his death disputed?”
“By who? The guy who wrote that hoax book? He killed himself after they exposed it, which is a pretty good indication he had something to be ashamed of. Even the conspiracy freaks didn’t believe that one. Anyway, whoever owns it, the corporation lives on—clerk told me it’s one of the biggest landowners west of the Mississippi, thousands of parcels. Ransom’s house happened to be one of them. With that kind of landlord, you can see why there’d be a quick sale.”
He finished his beer, got up to get a third.
“How’s your liver?” I asked.
“Peachy. Mom.” He made a point of guzzling. “Okay, so where were we? Magna, Medi-Cal files on the sister. All right, I guess it might be worth a try in terms of finding her, though I don’t know what the hell finding her’s going to tell us. How disabled was she?”
“Very.”
“Could she talk?”
“No.”
“Terrific.” He wiped foam from his lips. “I want to interview vegetables, I’ll go to a salad bar. What I am going to do is drive up Jalmia and talk to the neighbors. Maybe one of them phoned in the call, knows something about her.”
“About her and Trapp?”
“That would be nice.”
He went into the living room, turned on the TV, put his feet up, and watched the evening news. Within moments he was asleep. And I was remembering a black-and-white snapshot and thinking, despite what he’d said, about Shirlee Ransom. I went into the library and called Olivia Brickerman.
“Hello, darling,” she said, “I just got in and started tending to Prince Albert.”
“If I’m catching you in the middle of something—”
“What? Prunes and oat bran is something? Just hold on one second and I’ll be with you.”
When she came back on the line, she said, “There, he’s taken care of for the evening.”
“How’s Al doing?”
“Still the life of the party.”
Her husband, a grandmaster and
former chess editor for the Times, was a white-haired, white-bearded man who looked like an Old Testament prophet and had been known to go for days at a time without talking.
“I keep him around for torrid sex,” she said. “So, how are you, handsome?”
“Just fine, Olivia. How about yourself? Still enjoying the private sector?”
“Actually, right now I’m feeling pretty abandoned by the private sector. You remember how I got into this hotshot group, don’t you? My sister’s boy, Steve, the psychiatrist, wanted to rescue me from civil service hell and set me up as benefits coordinator? It was fine for a while, nothing too stimulating, but the pay was good, no winos vomiting all over my desk, and I could walk to the beach during lunch. Then, all of a sudden, Stevie takes a position at some drug-abuse hospital out in Utah. He got hooked on skiing; now it’s a religion with him. ‘Gotta go with the snow, Aunt Livvy.’ That’s an M.D. talking. Yale. The guy who replaced him is a real yutz, very cold, thinks social workers are a notch below secretaries. We’re already having friction. So if you hear I’ve retired permanently, don’t be surprised. Enough about me. How’ve you been?”
“Fine.”
“How’s Robin?”
“Terrific,” I said. “Keeping busy.”
“I’m waiting for an invitation, Alex.”
“One of these days.”
“One of these days, eh? Just make sure you tie the knot while I’m still functioning and can enjoy it. Want to hear a terrible joke? What’s the good thing about Alzheimer’s disease?”
“What?”
“You get to meet new people every day. Isn’t that terrible? The yutz told it to me. You think there was an underlying message?”
“Probably.”
“That’s what I think. The S.O.B.”
“Olivia, I need a favor.”
“And here I thought you were after my body.”
I thought of Olivia’s body, which resembled Alfred Hitchcock’s, and couldn’t help but smile.
“That too,” I said.
“Big talk! What do you need, handsome?”
“Do you still have access to the Medi-Cal files?”
“You kidding? We’ve got Medi-Cal, Medicare, Short-Doyle, Workmen’s Comp, CCS, AFDC, FDI, ATD—every file you can imagine, alphabet soup. These guys are serious billers, Alex. They know how to squeeze all the juice out of a claim. The yutz went back to school after his residency, and got an M.B.A.”
“I’m trying to locate a former patient. She was disabled, needed chronic care, and was hospitalized at a small rehab place in Glendale—on South Brand. The place is no longer there and I can’t remember the name. Ring any bells?”
“Brand Boulevard? No. Lots of places don’t exist anymore. Everything’s going corporate—these smart boys just sold out to some conglomerate from Minneapolis. If she’s totally disabled, that would be ATD. If it’s partial and she worked, she could be on FDI.”
“ATD,” I said. “Could she be on Medi-Cal too?”
“Sure. What’s the name of this person?”
“Shirlee Ransom, with two e’s. Thirty-four years old, with a birthday in May. May 15, 1953.”
“Diagnosis?”
“She had multiple problems. The main diagnoses were probably neurological.”
“Probably? I thought she was your patient.”
I hesitated. “It’s complicated, Olivia.”
“I see. You’re not getting yourself in trouble again, are you?”
“Nothing like that, Olivia. It’s just that there are some confidentiality issues here. I’m sorry I can’t get into it and if it’s too much of a hassle—”
“Stop being such a Goody Two-shoes. It’s not like you’re asking me to commit a crime.” Pause. “Right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, in terms of getting hold of the data, our on-line access is limited to patients treated in California. If your Ms. Ransom is still being treated somewhere in the state, I should be able to get you the information immediately. If she moved out of state I’d have to tap into the master file in Minnesota, and that would take time, maybe even a week. Either way, if she’s getting government money, I’ll get you an address.”
“That simple?”
“Sure, everything’s on computer. We’re all on someone’s list. Some yutz with a giant mainframe has a record of what you and I ate for breakfast this morning, darling.”
“Privacy, the last luxury,” I said.
“You’d better believe it,” she said. “Package it; market it; make a billion.”
Chapter
16
Friday morning I booked a Saturday flight to San Luis on Sky West. At 9:00 A.M. Larry Daschoff called and told me he’d located a copy of the porn loop.
“I was wrong. Kruse made it—must have been some kind of personal kick. If you still want to see it, I’ve got an hour and a half between patients,” he said. “Noon to one-thirty. Meet me at this place and we’ll watch a matinee.”
He recited a Beverly Hills address. Turning-over-the-rock time. I felt queasy, unclean.
“D.?”
“I’ll meet you there.”
The address was on North Crescent Drive, in the Beverly Hills Flats—the pricey prairie stretching from Santa Monica Boulevard to Sunset, and from Doheny west to the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Houses in the Flats range from two-bedroom “tear-downs” that wouldn’t stand out in a working-class tract to mansions big enough to corral a politician’s ego. The tear-downs go for a million and a half.
Once a quiet, cushy neighborhood of doctors, dentists, and show-business types, the Flats has become a repository for very new, very flashy foreign money of questionable origin. All that easy cash has brought with it a mania for monument-building, unfettered by tradition or taste, and as I drove down Crescent half the structures seemed to be in various phases of construction. The final products would have done Disney proud: Turreted Gray-stone Castle sans moat but cum tennis court, Mock-Moorish Mini-Mosque, Italianate-Dutch Truffle, Haute Gingerbread Haunted House, Post-Moderne Free-form Fantasy.
Larry’s station wagon was parked in front of a pea-green pseudo-French pseudo-Regency pseudo-townhouse with Ramada Inn overtones: glitter-flecked stucco walls, multiple mansards, green-and-gray striped awnings, louver windows, olive trim. The lawn was two squares of ivy, split by a concrete path. From the ivy sprouted whitewashed plaster statuary—naked cherubs, Blind Justice in agony, a copy of the Pietà, a carp taking flight. In the driveway was a fleet of cars: hot-pink ’57 T-bird; two Rolls-Royce Silver Shadows, one silver, one gold; and a maroon Lincoln Town Car with red vinyl top and a famous designer’s logo on its smoked windows.
I parked. Larry waved and got out of the Chevy. He saw me looking at the house and said, “Pretty recherché, huh, D.?”
“Who are these people?”
“Their name is Fontaine—Gordon and Chantal. They made their money in patio furniture somewhere out in the Midwest—the plastic strap and tubular aluminum stuff. Sold out for a fortune several years ago, moved to B.H., and retired. They give lots to charity, distribute Thanks-giving turkeys on Skid Row, come across like benevolent grandparents—which they are. But they love porn. Damn near worship it. They’re the private donors I told you about, the ones who funded Kruse’s research.”
“Good simple folk, huh?”
“They really are, D. Not into S and M or kiddie stuff. Just good old-fashioned straight sex on celluloid—they claim it rejuvenated their marriage, can get downright evangelical about it. When Kruse was setting up his research, he heard about them and tapped them for funding. They were so happy someone was going to finally educate the world about the therapeutic benefits of erotica that they coughed up without a fuss—must have handed over a couple of hundred grand. You can imagine how they felt when he changed his tune and started playing to the pro-censorship crowd. And they’re still steamed. When I called, Gordon remembered me as Kruse’s R.A. and let me know that as far as they’re concerned, Kruse is the scu
m of the earth. I mean he really catharted. When he stopped to take a breath, I made it clear I was no great Kruse fan myself, and told him what we were after. He calmed down and said sure, come on over. I think the idea of helping us really jazzed him. Like all fanatics, they love to show off.”
“What reason did you give him for wanting to see the film?”
“That the star was dead, we were old friends, and we wanted to remember her for everything she’d done. They’d read about it, thought it would be a dandy memorial.”
The grimy, Peeping Tom feeling returned.
Larry read my face, said, “Cold feet?”
“It seems … ghoulish.”
“Sure it’s ghoulish. So are eulogies. If you want to call it off, I’ll go in there and tell them.”
“No,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
“Try not to look so tortured,” he said. “One of the ways I gained entree was telling them you were sympatico to their hobby.”
I crossed my eyes, leered, and did some heavy breathing. “How’s that?”
“Oscar caliber.”
We reached the front door, a solid slab painted glossy olive.
“Behind the green door,” said Larry. “Very subtle.”
“You’re sure they have the loop?”
“Gordon said definitely. He also said they had something else we might be interested in.”
He rang the bell and it chimed out the first few notes of “Bolero,” then swung open. A Filipino maid in a white uniform stood in the doorway, petite, thirtyish, bespectacled, her hair in a bun.
“Yes?”
“Dr. Daschoff and Dr. Delaware to see Mr. and Mrs. Fontaine.”
“Yes,” said the maid. “Come in.”
We stepped into a two-story rotunda with a pastoral mural: blue skies, green grass, fluffy sheep, hay bales, a shepherd playing the pipes in the shade of a spreading sycamore.
In front of all that agrarian bliss sat a naked woman in a deck chair—fat, middle-aged, gray-haired, lumpy legs. She held a pencil in one hand, a crossword puzzle book in the other, didn’t acknowledge our entry.
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