by Tim Willocks
Ella MacDaniels plus man shot down in street was an equation with only one answer: George Grimes.
Where was George? Where was the girl?
Later.
Grimes looked back down at the wounded man’s heaving white thorax. His mind was totally clear, the information from the poster suspended for examination in an anxiety-free space. Medical action always did that for him: it cleared his mental field of all other concerns and coated his nerves with ice. To that extent it was paradoxically calming. He regretted that he was unable to attain this state in any other realm of his life. He lifted the guy’s head and took the rolled jacket and pushed it lengthwise between his shoulder blades to enlarge the gap between collarbone and first rib. The guy looked at him with the muddy, panic-flecked eyes of the dying and Grimes knew then that he was one of the men from the Nova, and knew for sure that it was his father who’d shot him down.
“Anybody see what happened?” asked Grimes.
He picked up the needle and ripped it from its sterile package, his eyes and hands concentrating as he listened.
“He came staggering outa that alley there and collapsed in front of me,” said a voice behind him. “I didn’t hear a thing.”
“There’s another body back there,” said Felton, “but he’s dead as mackerel. Three in the body and one in the head. Last shot, muzzle to skin.”
Grimes remembered the Japs on Tarawa. With his fingertip he found the spot he wanted: two centimeters lateral and inferior to the midpoint of the clavicle. The HIV risk briefly flitted across his mind; he banished it. He aimed the needle at the sternal notch and slid it in between the clavicle and the first rib. The guy was in too much pain to notice. The hub of the needle filled dark purple. Grimes went in a couple more millimeters, then held on to the needle and threaded the plastic cannula into the vein.
“I’ll take that tube now, Rod.”
Grimes smoothly withdrew the needle, put it on the ground by his foot and covered it safely with the sole of his shoe. He took the drip tube from Feiton’s hand and screwed it home. Holding the line firmly against the skin with his fingers, Grimes took the bag from Felton and squeezed, forcing the saline through as fast as he could.
“Is there another of these bags in there?” asked Grimes.
“No, that’s it.”
A siren approached. Paramedics. Grimes’s role was nearly over.
“Pass me some strips of tape,” he said.
While Felton rummaged in the white case Grimes looked at the wounded man. His waxy eyelids fluttered as he hovered on the edge of consciousness, and Grimes felt sorry for him. Whatever the guy was, or had done, lying on the ground with a bullet in your gut wiped clean a lot of slates. Pity had a habit of making good and bad seem unimportant. Still, Grimes had to know. He bent forward to the guy’s ear and lowered his voice.
“You work for Atwater?” he said.
The guy’s head floated up from the sidewalk, his panic-stricken eyes swimming for focus on Grimes’s face.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
Grimes regretted having increased the wounded man’s terror; but it had told him what he wanted to know. He gently pushed the guy back down, raised his voice again.
“Take it easy, sir. The ambulance is here.”
A hand dangling three strips of adhesive tape appeared in Grimes’s vision. He looked up into Felton’s curious face.
“Thanks, Rod,” said Grimes.
He took the strips one at a time and secured the drip tube as best he could to the victim’s skin.
“What did he say?” asked Felton.
“He asked me who I was.”
Grimes saw that Felton thought this a fair question. At least he didn’t appear to have heard him speak of Atwater.
“Name’s Tom Jackson,” said Grimes. “Family doctor up in Kansas City, Kansas. I’m on vacation, would you believe?”
Felton felt a bond and relaxed. “Always the way,” he said. “It’s happened to me too.”
“Never off-duty,” said Grimes, nodding.
There was a commotion behind them as the paramedics clattered through with a gurney. Grimes was suddenly surrounded by two eagle-eyed men weighing up his work with a hint of territorial suspicion as they unpacked their gear.
“I got a subclavian in,” said Grimes.
“Yeah,” said one of the paramedics, as if this were second-best.
“This is Dr. Jackson,” said Felton.
The paramedic said, “Yeah.”
Grimes handed over the near-empty drip bag. He pulled over the first-aid case, found a sharps box and discarded the used needle. He stood up. It was time to slip away.
“Well, you guys know this business better than I do.”
“Yeah.”
Grimes nodded and started back through the crowd toward his car. He felt a hand tap his shoulder. He turned. Felton smiled at him.
“You were cool in there, Doc. Thanks.”
“Couldn’t have managed without you, Rod. Thank you.”
“Where ya staying?”
“With friends, in the Garden District,” said Grimes.
His lying was improving all the time. Before Felton could probe any more Grimes held out his hand.
“You keep safe now.”
Felton shook. “You enjoy your vacation. And try not to scare the folks back home. This town’s rep is bad enough as it is.”
Grimes smiled and headed for his Olds and got in. As he drove away he saw the paramedics’ trolley trundle its bleeding cargo toward the ambulance. Grimes felt his clinical calm slipping away. Somewhere inside the head of the man on the stretcher was Grimes’s real name; his father’s, too. Grimes couldn’t bring himself to wish the man dead but the thought crossed his mind. His father was on his way to the Old Place, wherever it was; maybe with the girl Ella, maybe not. There was only one place for Grimes to go. He took a right at the next light and pointed the Olds in the direction of Arcadia.
EIGHT
THE VISIT OF Dr. Grimes left Lenna in a state of intense psychic and muscular agitation. If she’d been able to read him one way or the other she’d have felt better, but she couldn’t. She considered herself a shrewd judge of character, especially of men, among whom she spent most of her time. She’d sat through a thousand negotiations knowing exactly what was going through the minds of her opponents, for all their dissembling and false smiles. That was her advantage: they could rarely read her at all. She imagined them whining to themselves in their failure: she was a goddamned woman, and who the hell ever knew what went on inside a woman’s mind? Those old puffed-up self-important boys knew that while she could speak their language, they couldn’t speak hers. Their gender was against them. They knew how to push each other but not her: were they being too aggressive or not aggressive enough? She could be as aggressive as she liked; and while their attempts at seduction were laughable, hers had them whimpering in confusion. Some had the sense to try to play it straight and treat her like one of them in a skirt but even they lost too because she wasn’t one of them. Lenna wasn’t one of anybody. Neither, she sensed, was Eugene Grimes.
As she paced around the gloom of her study she followed that track. What was it that made her different, and if so, was it what made Grimes different too? Grimes was a psychiatrist. He knew all the nodding-dog tricks, the bland facade behind which his brain churned ten-to-the-dozen. Only at the last had he let something more leak out. But what? This angle would get her nowhere. She turned back to herself.
Her strength in the business deal, she’d learned long ago, was that she didn’t really care whether she won or lost. Her opponents nailed some vital part of their inmost selves to the success or failure of the deal and therefore they were scared. No matter how deep down the fear might be buried, it was there. Lenna wasn’t scared. She wasn’t scared because nothing of herself was at stake. She ran her businesses the way she did because she had nothing else to do with her time and nowhere else to go. She worked out daily in the gym downs
tairs for the same reason: there was no one she wanted to look good for and she had no desire to extend her life span. If she’d enjoyed collecting plastic-surgery scars or meeting Hollywood actors or shopping or big-game hunting, maybe she would have done those things instead. None of them would have occupied her mind to the degree she needed in order to keep her monster at bay. The monster, she did fear: for it was at the core of herself and at the core of her ineradicable self-loathing too.
Maybe that, then, was why she hadn’t been able to outguess Grimes: he didn’t want anything; he didn’t care. But this idea didn’t help her: she did not know if Grimes was a liar or not. That was the drip of doubt that Clarence Jefferson—the liar’s liar—had known would torment her. On balance, logic—based on her knowledge of Clarence’s techniques—dictated that Grimes was an innocent, randomly picked to stoke her pain. Certainly Grimes was no Atwater, snuffling desperately at the trough of power. Her strongest doubt about the doctor lay in the accuracy of Jefferson’s description of him, that Grimes was not a man to be pushed. She’d sensed that in the way he’d turned his pale eyes on Bobby Frechette. For a moment there she’d almost expected him to use the fists he’d held clenched by his sides. Jefferson had told her not to push but rather to wait. Yet the waiting—and the hope she dared not name—was peeling the lining from her guts. Lenna took Jefferson’s letter from her sleeve and read it through for the hundredth time. Then she went to the desk and called Bobby Frechette.
Frechette came through the door a moment later and stood waiting in silence. His presence relieved the churning in her gut. Only once had she spoken to Bobby as if he were a servant, and Bobby had quietly, and on the spot, tendered his resignation. He protected her, but she could have purchased that protection from many others; she could have hired a private army if she’d pleased. Lenna valued Bobby because although he adored her, he was prepared to look her in the eye and tell her what she didn’t want to hear. She had told him nothing of Jefferson’s letter.
“Bobby,” she said. “What did you make of Dr. Grimes?”
Frechette paused and Lenna waited.
“He gave me respect,” said Frechette.
“Would you trust him?” asked Lenna.
“I’d trust him to be his own man. That’s not the same thing.”
Lenna nodded, wearily. This she already knew.
Bobby said, “Grimes has been to the floor of the pit.”
“You know this?”
Bobby said, “Like I know you have.”
He’d never said this to her before. Had he dug into the things she hadn’t told him? Had the Jessups broken faith?
Lenna said. “What do you mean?”
“How or when or why, I won’t know—for either you or him,” said Bobby. “I know because I’ve been there too. If I was called on, I’d go there again. So would Grimes.”
Lenna knew for sure now that Grimes had lied to her: in their different ways both Bobby and Jefferson had described the same man.
Frechette said, “This is part of the Jefferson business, right?”
Lenna read the worry in his eyes.
“It might be. That’s what I need to know.”
Bobby Frechette said, “Grimes is no fuck-boy for Jefferson.”
Lenna flinched inside. In her way she’d been Jefferson’s fuck-boy. No other punishment had been appropriate to the scale of her guilt.
“Lenna,” said Bobby. He stopped, then, “Maybe it’s not my place to say this.”
“Don’t insult me, Bobby.”
“You should drop this whole thing right now.”
“I can’t.”
“Whatever the Captain left behind, this blackmail shit, you don’t need it. And if he had something on you and someone tries to use it against you, that someone will die.”
“Did you kill Clarence Jefferson, Bobby?”
“No.”
He held the moment so that she’d know he spoke the truth; and so she’d know, too, that he would’ve liked to.
“Whatever Jefferson was holding over you, I don’t care,” said Bobby. “Leave it to Atwater and the other scum. If they find it and come after you, fight them.”
“Bobby, it’s not about that anymore.”
“Lenna, I see you.” Frechette closed his eyes for a second. “No one else can. Believe me: you don’t need them or any of their workings. You never did.”
He paused and looked around the room that enshrouded them.
“And Grimes was right: you don’t need this place, either.”
“What did he say?” asked Lenna.
“He called it a mausoleum.”
Lenna knew Bobby hated Arcadia. So did she; it was part of the punishment she’d agreed on with her conscience. But Frechette had never spoken to her with such emotion.
“What’s wrong, Bobby? Are you expecting trouble?”
“No.” Behind the high-boned face Bobby struggled with himself. “But I saw the tear marks on your face too. I didn’t like it.”
“Then help me,” she said. “And forgive me if I can’t tell you why.”
This hurt him, though he would never say so. He stepped back inside his armor. A blankness glazed his eyes.
“I’ll do whatever you say,” he said. “To whoever you say.”
Lenna turned and walked away, trying to find a line through the jumbled impressions in her mind. In the letter, Jefferson had told her to wait. By now she knew it all by heart: “Put that to him, Lenna, and only that, then have patience and wait.” But she couldn’t wait. She turned back to Bobby.
“I want to see Grimes again. Tomorrow.”
Bobby remained impassive. He nodded once.
“Not here,” said Lenna. “We’ll go to him, to the City. And no At-water. You’re right. I’ll pay him off tomorrow.”
“That might not be that easy. He might figure he’s got something to sell to someone else.”
“Then we’ll fight them, like you said.”
The light came back into Bobby Frechette’s eyes and he nodded.
“Thanks, Bobby.”
Frechette closed the door behind him and Lenna went behind her desk. She searched in the desk drawer for the bottle of pills, found them. Her insomnia was entrenched. Twice a week she allowed herself a pill. Tonight she decided to take two. Anything to blank out some of the hours she would have to wait before seeing Grimes again. She knew in her gut that next time he’d tell her the truth. Or maybe that was just hope deluding her. Lenna tossed a pair of egg-shaped capsules into her mouth and drank from a glass of water. An intense exhaustion seized her from head to toe. Lenna put the glass down and went up to her bedroom.
By the time she’d showered and removed her makeup the drug was taking hold: a strangely plausible sense of peace. She’d wondered before how molecules could do this. Did it prove that all that she felt was just a dream after all? But because the drugged peace was so believable it was also incongruent with what she knew and therefore false. She looked at her face in the mirror: cleansed of makeup it appeared lifeless and parched. Another falsehood. She was drifting on a sea of falsehood. On that sea she walked through to her bed and lay down naked on the cover. Did she really care for what she cared for most—for whom she cared for most—or was that a falsehood too?
Lenna didn’t know her name.
She had never seen her face.
She had never heard her voice.
The molecules stroking her to a false peace took her under and Lenna fell asleep.
When she awoke the first thing she was aware of was that she was cold. She shivered and clenched her arms across her chest. She opened her eyes and the bedside lamp glared at her. She blinked. Her head was muddy: no thoughts, no pictures, no dreams. The telephone next to the lamp was ringing. She realized that that was what had woken her, not the cold. She dragged the coverlet around her shoulders and grabbed the phone.
“Bobby?” she said.
“Sorry to wake you, Lenna.” Bobby Frechette’s voice. “Atwater’s do
wn at the gate. He wants to see you.”
“Why?” she said. “What time is it?”
“It’s quarter after one.”
“What does he want?”
A pause.
“He says he’s found Clarence Jefferson. He’s alive.”
The sleeping pills buffered this information to the extent that she did not scream her reply.
“Let him come up. I’ll be down.”
The line went dead. Lenna got to her feet and walked to the bathroom. She felt a little unsteady but her head was clearing fast. She stuck her head under the cold shower and felt clearer still. She massaged her face and head with a rough towel and went back to the bedroom. Her blue dress lay crumpled on the floor. She stepped over it and slid open the wardrobe door. On a hanger she found the black pantsuit she’d worn earlier in the day and pulled it straight on, without underwear. She slipped on a pair of black leather pumps. She looked in a mirror. Her hair was damp and ratty. She looked like a hag. She didn’t care.
Atwater had found Jefferson. Alive.
Lenna went to the door and walked along the corridor to the broad first-floor landing. Beyond the balustrade she saw Bobby Frechette standing in the reception hall below. He looked more tense than she’d ever seen him. She saw his hand pat the small of his back where he carried his 9 mil Beretta. Then he heard her steps, soft on the carpet, and turned.
“Stay up there,” he said. “I want to check this out.”
Lenna walked past the balustrade and started down the steps.
“Why?” she said.
She was still feeling the cobwebbed floating effect of the sleeping pills. Bobby’s caution seemed alien and irrational.
“Lenna, please just do as I ask. Atwater’s brought that creep of his, Seed. They’re driving a panel van and it bothers me. Just give me five.”
Lenna scrubbed a hand across her face. She couldn’t make sense of the idea that a worm like Rufus Atwater might bother Bobby Frechette. Even so, she paused with her hand on the banister less than halfway down the stairs.
There was a rapping on the front door. Bobby stepped into a short alcove to one side of the door. In there was a row of monitors relaying pictures from the various cameras set up around the building. Bobby reappeared, chewing his lip.
