by Alan Russell
“I care,” she said, then shed a tear.
It wasn’t the kind of tear that Cheever had ever seen. The red drop rolled down her cheek. It was followed by another. He reached for her cheek and wiped away a tear of blood.
“Jesus,” he said.
CHAPTER
THREE
Cheever snuck another glance at Holly Troy. She sat in the passenger seat of his Taurus looking very serene and self-contained. At least she wasn’t crying anymore. He had looked for an eye injury but hadn’t been able to find one. Her tears had somehow been intermixed with blood. Cheever suspected some trick, but damned if he knew how it had been accomplished.
He returned his eyes back to the road. Cheever still wasn’t sure whether Holly was a mental case, or reacting to some drug, or both. Cheever had seen diabetics with insulin imbalance acting like rock monsters. Holly’s bracelet hadn’t clued him in to her condition. No disease was identified or caveat offered. There was only her patient number and an inscription that read: Before beginning any treatment, call Dr. R. Stern. That’s what Cheever had done, calling Dr. Stern at the number engraved on the bracelet. Holly’s close-mouthed doctor hadn’t deigned to clarify the situation for him, had just treated him like a delivery boy, asking whether he couldn’t “drop Helen off at my office.” The doctor had interchanged the names Holly and Helen several times during their short conversation. Cheever had wanted to ask her about that, and other matters, but Dr. Stern had sidestepped any inquiries.
“I think it would be better, Detective,” she had said, “if you waited to ask your questions at my office.”
The doctor had hung up before he could respond, an effective way of deferring his questions. And of pissing Cheever off.
He turned onto Fifth Avenue, tires lightly squealing, and headed east. Cheever didn’t need a doctor to tell him that Holly Troy was a strange one. She ran hot and cold. Over the course of a day he’d seen her go from being totally uncaring to displaying an almost desperate solicitude.
Holly turned toward him. “Where are we going?” she asked.
Cheever had explained their destination at the beginning of their drive, but did so again. “I am taking you to your doctor,” he said. “She can treat your wounds.”
“Wounds?” asked Holly.
Cheever motioned to her bloody shirt. “Your cuts,” he said.
“They’re not mine,” she said.
“Whose are they?”
She didn’t answer the question, saying instead, “I would like to cure Antiope, but she won’t let me. She is afraid.”
“Who is Antiope?”
Holly changed the subject again. “If I accept their pain,” she said, “she won’t hurt anymore.”
“Whose pain?”
“You’re right,” she said. “It is not only the dead I should be thinking about. There is the matter of your own pain.”
Her pronouncement surprised Cheever. “I am not the one who is hurting,” he said.
He tried not to be too dismissive, tried to keep his expression neutral. He knew how to deal with crazy people. But Holly wasn’t as adept at masking her expressions or hiding her feelings. She looked at him with great sympathy, as if he were a victim of some terrible accident, as if he were the one who had taken leave of his senses.
“I wish to help you,” she said. “Will you let me take on your pain?”
“I am not sick,” he said.
Holly shook her head sadly. “You are barely alive,” she said. “You are carrying deep wounds.”
“Let’s worry about your own,” Cheever said, his voice sharper than he wanted it to be. “Mind telling me how you hurt yourself?”
“I was playing with Graciela,” she said.
“Graciela?”
“Graciela Fernandez.”
Little Grace. Cheever took a deep breath and wondered if it was the same Graciela Fernandez. His Graciela. Two years ago Team IV had taken on her case. Little Grace was a seven-year-old who had disappeared. During the three months she was missing there were purported sightings of her around the country, but those proved to be cases of mistaken identity. Graciela was ultimately found under a pile of junk in an abandoned lot less than a mile from where she had been abducted. They still hadn’t caught her murderer.
“What do you mean you were playing with her?”
Holly didn’t answer the question, just gave him a beatific smile. “Graciela is fine,” she said. “Her spirit is lovely. She came back and told me that everything was all right.”
“When was this?”
She didn’t answer, except to smile a little more.
“Where did you see her?”
“On the billboard,” she finally answered, her voice as far away as the clouds.
Holly wasn’t alone in saying she had seen Grace after the little girl died. Many San Diegans had claimed to see little Grace’s reflection on a South Bay billboard not long after her body was discovered. For a short time the billboard had become a San Diego shrine, with thousands of San Diegans flocking to see the so-called miracle. The skeptical said the “miracle” was a result of the lighting, and that when the illumination was turned off, Graciela’s reflection couldn’t be seen. Cheever hadn’t joined the crowds looking for a miracle. He had been too busy looking for a murderer. Futilely looking.
Two more tears of blood dropped from Holly’s eyes. Her neck and back began bleeding again, making her dress more red than white.
“Don’t,” Cheever said. For a second time he reached out to her cheek, gathering in one of her red tears. What he held wasn’t crimson mascara, or tears colored by some reflection, or tinted lights. It was blood. Even Doubting Thomas would have been convinced.
“I would like to help you with your pain,” she said. “That is my purpose.”
Early in his career with SDPD Cheever had been assigned to vice. He knew about scams, had been in on the arrest of a group of gypsies who were peddling everything from fountain of youth water to the baby Jesus’s foreskin. But if Holly was pulling an act, where was the profit in an old cop? They looked at one another until Cheever broke off their eye contact. He wasn’t used to her kind of intense searching. It was his job to do the looking. Who was she to stare at him with such pity?
“If it will make you feel any better,” he said, “go ahead and take on my pain.”
“Thank you,” she said, as if he was the one bestowing the boon.
Her bloody waterworks let up, and she smiled at him. Damned if she didn’t look like one of those martyred saints, he thought. Even supermarkets were getting into the icon business. Whenever he wheeled his cart around his local market he always paused at the large candles with idealized portraits of Jesus and Mary and the Virgin of Guadalupe and a few of the better-known saints. The Mexicans were big on those candles. Lights for inspiration. He could probably use one or two of them himself.
Holly’s eyes were closed again. She didn’t speak for almost a minute. When she awoke from her meditation she said, “Trouble always occurs when statues come to life. It’s all so confusing, isn’t it? It would have been better had Galatea just slept and never awakened.”
The name was familiar to Cheever, but he couldn’t immediately place it. “Galatea?”
She sat there without moving, without blinking, not responding to his question. Then, shaking her head as if awakening, she turned to Cheever and asked, “Did you know my father?”
“What was his name?”
“He was a great healer who was killed because of his powers. He brought the dead to life, and some couldn’t abide that. It has always been so, hasn’t it?”
Cheever kept the skepticism, and the certain knowledge that he was dealing with someone not in her right mind, out of his voice. “Raising the dead,” he agreed, “has always seemed to get people in trouble.”
“I am my father’s daughter,” she said, sounding not altogether happy at the pronouncement. “Within me are his powers. I have to accept that mantle. But you don’t ra
ise the dead without paying a great price and making yourself a target for mighty enemies.”
The car in front of them slowed and Cheever had to brake. Cheever thought the traffic on Fifth was heavier than usual, or maybe it just seemed that way because of Holly’s strange sermonizing.
“My destiny is to help others,” she said, “to see to their needs, to cure them of their ailments.”
Cheever wondered whether it was his imagination or whether the faster she preached the more she bled. He was looking at her reddening shirt when the Taurus hit a large pothole that bounced both of them around in their seats. Cheever swore, then quickly glanced over to see if his words had shocked Sister Holly. The eyes that looked back at him didn’t want to save his soul. They regarded him coolly, speculatively.
“You want to try it one more time?” she asked. “I might have a couple of teeth left.”
“Sorry.”
“Damn,” she said. “I’m bleeding.”
Cheever wondered at her apparent surprise. The bleeding sounded like a revelation to her. “We’re almost there,” he said. “Dr. Stern will help you.”
“By doing what? Yammering until my blood beats a bored retreat?”
He tried to suppress a smile, but wasn’t totally successful. “She’s a psychologist?”
“Worse. A psychiatrist. License to pill.”
Was this the same woman? So concerned before, so righteous, and now so glib and insouciant? He sneaked another look at her. “You seem better,” he said.
She played with her bloody garb. “I’m obviously over my PMS,” she said.
He didn’t let her humor distract him. “You were...out of it...earlier.”
“I must have been.”
“Is there anyone I should contact to say you’ll be late?”
“You might tell my dog his bowl of Purina is going to be delayed.”
“What kind of dog?”
“Rottweiler. He was bartered as a puppy for one of my pieces.”
“Nice breed.”
“You got a dog waiting for you?”
Cheever shook his head. “A wife?” she asked.
“No.”
“Kids?”
How had she become the questioner? Cheever hesitated a moment before saying, “None.”
“Where do you live?”
Usually he was purposely vague with people he didn’t know, answering “north county.” They never knew whether he was referring to inland or along the coast. He could be talking anywhere from Poway to Oceanside. But for once he was specific. “Leucadia. The area where I live used to be one big avocado grove.”
Cheever had gone bird hunting a few times as a kid. Holly’s sudden stillness reminded him of the way his father’s setter had used to freeze when he saw a bird. Out loud, she whispered, “Leucadia.” He figured she was surprised at his long work commute. “It’s a haul, but...”
“It was from the promontory of Leucadia,” Holly said, “that Sappho threw herself into the sea.”
She was looking different again, he thought, smaller and sadder, more contemplative. “Sappho,” she said again, offering the name like you would a friend’s. Then Holly told the story as if it meant something to her, as if she knew all there was to know about lost love.
“Sappho was one of the great Greek poets. She was in love with Phaon, who didn’t return that love. From atop a ridge Sappho threw herself into the sea. It was believed if you survived such a leap you would lose your love and get over your heartache.”
“A cure worse than the disease,” Cheever said.
“Not necessarily,” she said.
She looked at him, watched as he began to change. She was used to that happening, knew that he wasn’t the one really changing, but that she was.
Was this the one, she wondered? Messengers of the gods assumed many forms. He was tall and of medium build. His hair was mostly white. He had blue eyes, but they were clouded over, and in order to truly see them, you had to travel past his layers of hardness, the cataracts to his being. If he was the one, he hid his passport of divinity well. As she tried to see more clearly, she switched again.
Damn daylight savings, thought Cheever. It got dark too early these days. The time change had occurred the week before. From the shadows he could see that Holly was moving her hands around. He turned his head and watched as her fingers pantomimed stretching something out.
“Like Sappho, you threw yourself from a promontory to try and get over a lost love,” she declared. Her voice had changed again, had become raspy and unpleasant.
She was nuts, Cheever thought. Just ignore her. Anyone could talk about a lost love and hit the mark. It was a universal soft spot. But he was still annoyed. Her hands were snapping or cutting something. They looked like a crab having spasms.
“Since you’re well enough to make speeches,” he said, “I’d say you’re well enough to answer some questions. Let’s begin with your telling me about the last time you saw Bonnie Gill.”
Holly’s dramatics suddenly ceased. She was completely silent, though her eyes remained watchful.
“Did you see Bonnie yesterday?” he asked.
She didn’t say anything, clammed up completely. Cheever asked his question again. Holly again said nothing. She wasn’t talking, unless you took her eyes into account. They looked afraid.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Holly’s mute act didn’t stop in the car. Her silence continued for the rest of the drive and didn’t help improve Cheever’s mood. But Holly was able to communicate when it suited her. She pointed out where Cheever should park and signed which elevator to take. The medical building was mostly deserted. No doubt all the doctors were making house calls, thought Cheever.
Dr. Stern’s office was on the third floor. Holly pressed a button, and they were buzzed inside. The operation was like a prison, thought Cheever. The first opened door only got them as far as an anteroom where there were several chairs and a desk for a receptionist who wasn’t there. They weren’t alone for long. Another door opened and a woman walked into the waiting room. She looked to be in her early forties and wore her caduceus in her expression: concerned, professional, and supercilious. Her hair, more pepper than salt, was medium length and wavy, and her eyes a dark brown. She had on a gray suit with a white blouse that was either a size too small or her bust was a size too large. She was about five and a half feet tall, but her high heels and erect posture made her look taller.
The doctor acknowledged Holly with a nod and slight smile of welcome. She took note of her bloodied garments with the professionalism of an admitting nurse, but made no comment about them. Then she turned to Cheever, stuck out her hand, and said, “I am Dr. Rachel Stern.”
“Detective Cheever.”
“Detective, I need you to wait here while I talk with Helen inside.”
The doctor was used to being in control. So was Cheever. “Is her name Holly,” Cheever asked, “or is it Helen?”
“That is a matter we will discuss shortly.”
That wasn’t a timetable of Cheever’s choosing, and he wanted her to know it. “Doctor, for the last eighteen hours I’ve been investigating the murder of Bonnie Gill, the owner of an art gallery that Holly was professionally, if not personally, associated with. Holly’s reaction to Bonnie Gill’s death has been...unusual.”
“What do you mean by unusual, Detective?”
“Look at her,” he said, as if that should have been explanation enough. “This morning she acted like she couldn’t care less about the murder. Then eight hours later she comes to me doing a sackcloth-and-ashes routine and then some. And for the last fifteen minutes she’s been playing the mute and not saying anything at all.”
“I will talk with her, Detective.”
“I’d like to know where she was last night from six o’clock until midnight. I also want to hear about the last time she saw Bonnie Gill.”
“I will talk with her,” the doctor said again, then motioned to her patient.
“Please come inside, Helen.”
Cheever watched as the door closed on him. He wasn’t pleased about being shut out of their conversation, and paced the room for a minute before stopping to examine a few of the doctor’s too many diplomas. When Cheever tired of counting her magna cum laudes, he stepped over to the window and took in the view. The street below was lined with mostly whitewashed ancillary medical buildings. To the south was the Hillcrest business district. Cheever knew San Diego Bay was several miles to the west, but the darkness only allowed him to catch a hint of it, more mirage than not.
Holly or Helen? When the connection came to him, Cheever almost laughed aloud. Helen Troy, he realized. Here he was waiting outside of a psychiatrist’s office to talk with Helen of Troy. The shrink probably treated Napoleon too. And Joan of Arc.
Cheever was tempted to leave, but instead he went and sat in a chair. How many chances do you get to talk with Helen of Troy anyway? As far as Cheever could determine, the only thing the modern Helen had in common with her namesake was a natural beauty that even her punk and monk outfits couldn’t hide. Settling into the chair, Cheever contemplated the legendary Helen and the furious war waged over one beautiful woman—
“Detective Cheever. Detective Cheever.”
Dr. Stern didn’t touch him, just repeated his name incrementally louder until he woke up. Cheever opened his eyes, blinked hard a few times, then got up, albeit unsteadily. He looked at his watch, saw that he had slept for almost an hour.
“I almost didn’t want to wake you,” she said.
“For my sake or yours?”
The doctor’s goodwill vanished. She motioned for Cheever to follow her into the office. Tired though he was, her shrink’s couch wasn’t tempting. One wall of her office was lined with books, thick-looking tomes, while another had paintings, mostly modern. There weren’t many homey touches in the room, nothing soft, nothing revealing, no pictures or mementos to be seen.
