The Liar's Lullaby

by Meg Gardiner

  “I have an appointment with Vienna Hicks,” Jo said.

  The receptionist wiped off the lipstick. “Jesus, you came out of nowhere.”

  Nobody climbed the stairs around here, that was certain. But Jo bet half the attorneys spent an hour on the StairMaster at the gym.

  The receptionist picked up the phone. Jo wandered the lobby. The building was old enough to have tall sash windows. Outside, sunlight hit the sides of surrounding buildings. It reflected orange, a hot note that seemed to touch each pane of glass like a twang, singing the city toward evening. Down Sacramento Street, between skyscrapers, a sliver of the bay scintillated blue.

  The receptionist set down the phone. “Ms. Hicks will be right out.”

  Jo lingered by the windows. The building was built of excellent gray granite. The Art Deco design had copious edges and corners. It would make an elegant rock-climbing problem. For a moment Jo felt an urge to attack it.

  “Dr. Beckett.”

  Vienna’s swooping voice caught her like a lariat. Jo turned. Vienna loomed in the hallway, fists planted on her hips. The receptionist stood behind her desk gripping her purse. Vienna waved her toward the elevator.

  “I’ll escort Dr. Beckett out, Dana Jean. And I’ll turn off the lights. And feed the lizards. Shoo.”

  Dana Jean scooted for the elevator. Vienna beckoned Jo down the hall.

  Jo followed her toward her office. “I’m surprised you’re still here.”

  “The day after my sister died, you mean? I’m listed in the phone book. The media’s camped out on my driveway. The office is a sanctuary.”

  She turned a corner. Vienna didn’t seem to walk down the hall so much as to fill it, like a gliding manta ray.

  “That’s why I asked you to come down here. Call me anal compulsive, or passive retentive, over-protective, but Tasia was my baby sister and I don’t want the cops or the tabloids getting information that’s irrelevant.”

  “If you thought it was irrelevant, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Vienna’s office was crowded with two desks, a dead potted cactus, and shelves of case binders. She thumped down into her chair like a depth charge, opened a desk drawer, and took out a phone.

  “Tasia forgot this, a couple of months ago. It’s an unlisted number and I haven’t shown it to anybody else.”

  “So the police don’t know about it?” Jo said.

  “I see no point. A phone? Tasia had lots of phones. She had gewgaws and knickknacks all over the place. She picked them up like candy. At awards ceremonies, she got amazing goodie bags. I’m not talking potpourri and scented soap. I mean vintage Champagne and Xboxes and five-hundred-dollar shoes.”

  Jo had seen some of those on the floor in Tasia’s bedroom. “That’s all?”

  “Maybe a Stinger missile at the Grammys, I don’t remember.”

  Jo sat down across the desk. “Have you gone through the information on the phone?”

  Vienna inhaled. Held it, like she was fighting hiccups, or her conscience. Finally exhaled. “I didn’t. Until the police contacted me about the break-in.”

  Jo kept the heat out of her voice. “Why didn’t you tell me this morning when I called?”

  Vienna looked out the window. “You have a family? Siblings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any of them live their lives like a crystal vase? That’s rolling across a firing range?”

  Her voice was strong, even boisterous, but Jo heard a cracked note in it.

  “Any of them live like a dove that’s set free in a peace ceremony and flies straight into the eternal flame? And keeps flying, while you try to douse the fire or keep her aloft or avert your eyes?” she said. “Every time, I’d think I got the flames extinguished. And this beautiful creature would fly on, soaring in circles. And I ran around beneath her flight path with my hands out, begging God not to let her wings disintegrate, not to let her ignite again, not to let her fall.”

  Vienna pressed her lips closed, as though to keep her voice from quavering. “Thank God our folks aren’t still alive to suffer through this.”

  Her eyes welled. Jo’s own stomach tightened.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “She left a bunch of stuff around my place. But it’s personal. I see no need to hand it to the police. That would be like pulling the covers off her in the morgue and inviting everybody to stare and point.” Brusquely, she wiped her eyes. “But they are already.”

  She straightened. “How do you work? You hand everything straight to the cops? Or can you keep some information out of your report?”

  “I’m not a police officer. I’m a civilian consultant, and I have the same obligation as any other citizen if I discover evidence of a crime. I’ll report it. But I’m preparing a report for the police and it will become part of the public record. You should regard any information on that phone as available to the courts.”

  Vienna’s expression tightened. The look in her eyes was brittle.

  “That said,” Jo added, “I’m not obligated to divulge every scrap of information I obtain.”

  Vienna covered the phone with her hand. “So you understand—context, I mean. I want to protect my sister.”

  “Understood.”

  “When Tasia’s bipolar disorder was out of control a few years ago, she projected a lot of her feelings and fears on to others. Rob especially.”

  Rob, the commander in chief.

  “Periodically she’d express a lot of anger about the things he was doing that she thought were ‘evil.’ Her word.”

  “Things relating to their married life?” Jo said.

  “No. It had no connection to reality. She talked in grandiose terms about him being a threat.”

  “To her personally?”

  “To the nation. This was when he was in the Senate. You’re doing a great job of not shouting paranoia.”

  “I presume there’s no record of abuse or assault in their marital history.”

  Vienna shook her head. “Never. Rob was a prince. Until he turned into a frog, anyhow. But that’s just divorce, ain’t it?”

  Paranoid people blocked out psychic recognition of their own faults. They disavowed upsetting attitudes and traits in themselves—envy, hate, aggression—and instead projected those attitudes on to others. That’s why paranoids saw threats all around them.

  “Did Tasia think McFarland intended to harm her?” Jo said.

  “Not him. The government. FBI. CIA. But I have to stress, her condition was out of control.”

  “What happened?”

  “At first she wallpapered friends and family with manic manifestos. She issued ‘communiqués’ to me. But eventually she wrote to Rob’s Senate office accusing the government of persecuting her. He called me.”

  “Robert McFarland phoned you, personally? About Tasia? What did he say?”

  “I don’t talk about Rob.”

  Jo spread her hands. “You’re tantalizing me here. Please.”

  Vienna hesitated. “All I’ll say is, he could have sent the letter to the FBI. Instead, he called me.”

  “Are you saying he wanted to be sure Tasia got help, and quietly?”

  “She was off her meds. He understood that. I got her hospitalized.”

  “That must have been distressing.”

  “I used to weigh a hundred and ten pounds,” Vienna said.

  Jo kept her expression even.

  Vienna laughed, brief and sharp. “You must clean up at the poker table, doctor. That’s the deadest deadpan expression I’ve ever seen. I’ve always been a bountiful Botticelli gal.”

  Jo let one side of her mouth curl up.

  Vienna leaned her elbows on the desk. She eyed Jo up and down, as she’d done that morning. This time, she seemed to decide that Jo passed muster.

  “It was a turning point. After that, Tasia gradually got things under control. The paranoia diminished. The communiqués ended. She stopped ranting about politics, or about Rob, period. That was all in the past.” S
he pushed the phone across the desk. “Or maybe not.”

  Jo picked it up. “What’s on here?”

  “Tasia used the phone’s Web app to browse antigovernment extremist sites.”

  Jo turned it on. “Did she just browse? Or did she contribute?”

  “She was offering pseudonymous comments on rabid right-winger sites. That could kill her reputation, forever. Do you see why I want to keep this confidential?”

  “Pseudonymous. Do you think people knew who she really was? Think one of them broke in to her house today? Was somebody from an online forum threatening her?”

  “They’re nasty folks. I find that completely plausible.”

  Vienna spun her chair to face the window. The phone powered up. A colorful screen offered Jo a selection of programs.

  “Any place you suggest I start?” she said.

  “Web browser. Most recent.”

  Jo went online. The most recent Web site Tasia had accessed was treeofliberty.com.

  She scrolled through the topics listed on the front page. “Not bedtime reading for the children, is it?”

  “Maybe in places where they keep cyanide capsules in the medicine cabinet, so they can put down the wife and kiddies before the Red Army storms the bunker.”

  “The hot topic of discussion is Tasia’s ‘assassination.’ ”

  “I didn’t read any of those essays. I don’t need to have a stroke today.”

  Jo was about to access one, but saw, at the top of the page: You are logged in as Fawn01.

  “She really didn’t tell them who she was?” Jo said.

  “You want to go through months and months of that stuff? Be my guest. But who’s going to hose you off afterward?”

  The tenor of commentary on the site varied from smug to ravening to vicious. Jo skimmed Tasia’s contributions. Though written in a tone of histrionic ennui, her comments seemed coherent—in contact with reality, as agreed upon by participants in the forum. They wouldn’t have passed a history or citizenship exam. But neither would they have caused a psychiatrist to think Tasia was psychotic.

  “Tasia writes under a pseudonym. Did she have to give an e-mail address to sign in?” Jo asked, more to herself than to Vienna.

  “I limit my online forums to Cakelovers for Peace. I don’t know.” Vienna shrugged. “I presume she was hiding this activity from us, and trying to segregate it from her computer by using this phone.”

  Jo picked her way through the phone’s screens and programs. Nothing obvious. She went back to the forum. Picking a topic, she decided to add a comment.

  “Let’s see how they like my opinions on the Supreme Court,” she said.

  As soon as she clicked the link to add a comment, the screen brought up a dialogue box. It showed Fawn01 logged in, with an accompanying e-mail address.

  “Got you,” Jo said.

  The e-mail address was tied to the phone itself. It must have been set up automatically with Tasia’s account. Jo showed it to Vienna.

  “Recognize that address?”

  Vienna shook her head. Jo went to the mail program. If it was password protected, she’d be in trouble. But Tasia’s paranoid tendencies hadn’t been thorough and well organized. She’d set the program to remember her password. Jo found herself directed straight to Tasia’s account.

  Inbox: 1427 messages.

  “Whoa.”

  Vienna leaned over the desk. “Wait, how many messages?”

  “Fourteen hundred.” She checked the dates. “In the last three months.”

  She scrolled through the inbox. The hairs on her arms stood up. “Who’s Archangel X?”

  Ever done this?

  Would you like me to do this to you?

  Why won’t you answer me?

  ANSWER ME

  Jo opened that one. Involuntarily, she hissed through her teeth.

  Nobody said you were allowed to be so rude. I have written to you many many times and you won’t even dignify me with an answer. You are a full-on BITCH.

  “What?” Vienna said.

  Next one down. Like 99 percent of the messages in the inbox, it was from Archangel X.

  You have no right to ignore me. I’ll see you, bitch. I’ll see you onstage. I’ll see you when you sleep. I’ll see you in the hereafter.

  Jo grabbed her own phone. She dialed Amy Tang. Vienna read the screen. “Oh God.”

  “Yeah,” Jo said. “Your sister had a stalker.”

  20

  NMP GOT OFF THE RATTLING MUNI BUS AT TURK STREET. THE bus stop was scribbled with graffiti. The sun skimmed the rooftops to the west. It was gold and sharp, like an accusing finger, pointed straight at him. NMP glanced around.

  No. Don’t let them know you suspect they’re after you. Walk.

  He pulled the watch cap low on his forehead and rumbled down the street. The wind bitched between buildings. He squeezed his hands into knots, panicky. People could see him. Hovering like an angel had failed.

  Keep it together. You are NMP, the big bad bastard. You are the sword of truth.

  Show it. Walk the talk. You carry a deuce, deuce and a half—show the street every nasty ounce of it. Make ’em think if they screw with you they’ll suffer. Then they’ll keep their distance.

  And if they don’t, they’ll get a rock to the head.

  The Tenderloin wasn’t a place to get caught alone as night fell. Garbage stank from rusting trash cans. On a vacant lot, behind a chain-link fence woven with weeds, three men leaned on the bumper of a car. They were as thin as oil dipsticks, laughing.

  NMP had been riding the bus and walking alleys, staying on the move, since the encounter at Tasia’s house. And everywhere, people had stared. The way people at school used to stare, or at the movies, or the library, at Noel Michael Petty, Wide Load. The way Noel’s sister and her friends used to snicker on the school bus at Jesus-what-a-fat-ass.

  And today’s skirmish had been a sickening failure.

  All NMP’s surveillance, all that time spent hovering above Tasia’s house. And finally, when NMP got the chance to slip inside, the music journalist showed up, and the stranger, the woman who was taking photos. The woman had been in his space. Looking. Stealing the private moment. NMP knew what they were up to. They were planning to turn Tasia’s house into a shrine. The Basilica of the Fame Fucker. Where they could perpetuate the lie. Talking love love love.

  NMP should have hit the man harder. More times. For good.

  He neared a decrepit pickup truck, parked at the curb. A dog was locked in the cab. The mutt leaped at the window, barking at him.

  Tasia’s bedroom. Guitar leaning against the chair. Boots by the bed . . .

  He wanted to scream, but couldn’t. Shh. Don’t tell, precious love.

  Striding up the grimy street, Petty groaned. Searle had watched Tasia perform her striptease. Searle had undressed by her bedside. She had taken him, debauched herself with him, left her smell, his smell, everywhere in the bedroom, like a rebuke. Like a slap in the face.

  For months, NMP had refused to believe it. NMP had stayed loyal. Tabloid gossip, stage- managed lies, boiled up for publicity—that’s what Tasia’s alleged “affair” had to be. Had to. But it wasn’t fiction. It was true.

  A cry escaped his throat.

  The dog kept barking. NMP tramped to the truck and barked back. The dog went berserk, claws scrabbling, slobber flecking the pickup’s window. NMP grabbed the truck’s radio antenna. He sawed it back and forth until it broke off. He stuck it through the crack at the top of the window and jabbed it at the dog. Over and over again.

  “Hey.”

  He rattled the glass and whipped the antenna and hit the mutt until it cowered.

  “Hey, motherfucker, stop it.”

  The men by the trash can were shouting. NMP pulled the antenna out, turned, and slashed the air with it. The men stopped shouting. Like that.

  NMP stepped back, panting. Holding on to the antenna, ready to whip anybody who approached him, he ran. At the corner, the ligh
ts of the hotel marquee fizzed, spastic red neon. THE BALMORAL. Three letters were out, so it looked like THEMORAL. Yeah, the moral of the story was, never trust Tasia McFarland. NMP shoved through the door, huge hands flat on the glass, face burning. The clerk looked up, barely, and back down at his lap. A TV on the desk showed the rictus grin of Robert McFarland, Tasia-humper. NMP rushed past and up the creaking stairs.

  Tasia the slut. Tasia the crazy whore. Taking Searle Lecroix into her bed. Like she’d taken other men, like a trail of slime back to her teens. The greedy bitch. Having the president of the United States wasn’t enough for her?

  What kind of insatiable succubus nymphomaniac had to take the president, throw him aside, and then go after the rest of the men of America? What kind of empty hole had to take Searle Lecroix at the end?

  When NMP was waiting?

  The hotel room was stuffy and dispirited. Petty shut the door and pounded his head against it. No fair. No fair.

  NMP was finished waiting. If he couldn’t hover, he could strike.

  JO HIKED UPParnassus Avenue toward the UC San Francisco Medical Center. The sun was casting a hallucinogenic red light across the Pacific. She hitched her satchel higher on her shoulder and leaned into the hill. Outside the med center entrance, men and women with cameras and microphones were clustered on the sidewalk. The press was waiting for news on Ace Chennault.

  In the lobby Tang was pacing, phone to her ear. When Jo walked in, she waved her toward the elevator. “We have five minutes to talk to Chennault.”

  Jo accompanied her across the lobby. “How’s he doing?”

  “Good condition. They’re keeping him overnight for observation. He’s lucky.” She pushed the elevator call button. “And don’t even think of asking me to walk up the stairs. Clock’s ticking.”

  Jo’s claustrophobia hissed tiny space. They stepped into the elevator and Tang pushed the button like she was grinding out a cigarette butt. On somebody’s face. The doors closed.

  Jo’s palms were sweating, but she gave Tang a sickly grin. “Let me guess. You just won the lottery.”