Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money

by Linda L. Richards

  When he arrived I was quickly reminded of the old world quality that had attracted me to him in the first place. He owned a courtliness that I’d seldom experienced in a man. I imagined that if we gone for a ride in a car together, he would have rushed to my side first to open the door. He just had that air about him.

  He smiled when he saw me, “And you are punctual, too,” he said. “There is much that is refreshing about you, Madeline Carter.” When he took my hand, I half expected him to kiss it, and couldn’t decide whether or not I was disappointed to find it merely firmly shaken.

  Dinner was better than I’d expected, something Alex remarked on saying that he came here often for that very reason. This surprised me since, being a raw food vegetarian, it didn’t seem to me that he ate much that couldn’t have been purchased at a market vegetable sellers and prepared for table with a good scrub. He seemed to delight, however, in the enjoyment I took in my seared scallops in a wasabi sauce with risotto served plain, in the Milanese style.

  “Amazing,” I said when he asked how it was, though it would have been clear I was enjoying it. “Will you please have a scallop? Or a bite of risotto? I feel like a complete animal here wolfing down this wonderful food while you watch me while eating your raw corn relish or whatever that is you’re having.”

  “Raw corn risotto. Which, of course, isn’t a risotto at all, since it’s made with no rice and is almost entirely composed of practically uncooked corn. But they must call it something smashing to justify these prices,” he smiled. “But I love it. I enjoy it. And it’s good for me.”

  I pointed to the bottle of pinot gris we were sharing and said, “What about that? Surely that can’t be raw food vegetarian approved?”

  He shrugged in an entirely continental way. “I eat as I do for my health and to increase the enjoyment of my life. But food without wine? That would reduce my joy sufficiently that it would shorten my life.” He smiled. “That’s how I see it, anyway. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

  We laughed. It was easy to laugh with Alex and he seemed dedicated to making me laugh as much as possible, so it was difficult to steer him to talking about his work. But I persevered. There was a great deal I wanted to know.

  “I’ve been thinking so much about what you were talking about the other night. The subject of your work.”

  “Corporate psychopaths,” he supplied

  “Yes. What you said made me think of someone I used to know. Someone who perhaps fits your description.”

  He wagged a gentle but accusing finger at me. “You be careful with that, my dear. It’s something I hear a lot. And while many people — especially ex-husbands, so it would appear — can seem to exhibit psychopathic behavior, the label doesn’t fit everywhere it’s applied. It’s very specific. And, truly: my colleagues are correct, some of the behaviors I described to you can be ascribed to other causes. Some of them even medical. But the true psychopath can best be identified by his utter lack of remorse. And people say that: Oh, he was remorseless. But to see it, on a clinical level, is quite different. Remorse — conscience, call it what you will — is simply not a factor of the psychopath’s make up.”

  “So how would you tell?” I paused, thinking. “How would I tell?”

  “You’d bring your psychopath to me,” he smiled, “or someone like me. A professional. It’s not the sort of thing for armchair, or amateur, diagnosis.”

  “But let’s say I wanted to make an amateur diagnosis. From a distance. One that would have no impact on the person in question’s life. What would I look for?”

  “We’re being hypothetical, yes?”

  I nodded.

  Alex looked thoughtful for a moment, as though debating if he should answer at all and then thinking about what might be useful to me. But it was obviously a topic close to his heart, and he didn’t have to dig very far. “OK, hypothetically then: is this person a corporate type or of the more common criminal class? It’s salient because, while there are commonalties, there are differences, as well.”

  “Definitely corporate,” I said without hesitation.

  “Right, then this person would most likely give the appearance of being — and would in fact be — highly intelligent and strongly capable. There would probably be a glibness about them, a slyness. The kind of person who can get into a scrape, but can always get out. Beneath the surface would be a sexual promiscuity, one that would probably be at least a factor in the succession of relationships your psychopath would have.

  “The other factor is the boredom. Since psychopaths are easily bored by many aspects of their lives, this manifests itself in both the promiscuity but also in the way they conduct their business. There must always be bigger and better thrills. And the psychopath finds people valuable: but not as you or I might. To him, it is always about: how can this person help me, aid me, make my life better? And once that usefulness has been extracted, it’s on to the next one. You see how many of these things tie into each other?”

  I nodded. I could see exactly. “What you’re describing is a monster, capable of anything,” I said flatly.

  Alex sighed. Nodded. “In many cases, I’m afraid you’re right.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Inexplicably, I dreamed of Arianna. She was standing in a field, keeping something hidden from me. “You’ll never find her,” she finally shouted. And I knew she was talking about Jennifer. I woke up with a start and a shout and Tycho rushed over to me to see what the problem was.

  I’d forgotten he was there. “Don’t you have a home?” I asked him. He just wagged his tail.

  Thinking about Arianna reminded me of the other paper she’d shown me. And Arrowheart. A name or word that was completely unfamiliar, yet I felt as though it should twig something. I lay back in my little nest and toyed with the word in my head. Arrow. Arrowroot. Heart of Arrow. Was it a name? A company? A place? A product? A car? Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and, even though it was four am, I swung out of bed and booted my computer.

  And then I did a Google search: arrowheart. Just like that: the single word.

  There were lots of references. Inns on the east coast, something about bridges in Madison County, there was a very worthwhile sounding program that had to do with telling stories to young offenders and people in prison. I scanned on, occasionally following a link, until I came to one dealing with the history of the Big Bear, California area. And there, on a badly designed web page that looked as though it had been lost in cyberspace since 1998, I found something that made sense. Amid reams of text scattered with bad photos, it mentioned Camp Arrowheart, built by the YMCA in the mid-nineteen-twenties about fifty miles from Lake Arrowhead, where “thousands of Southern California children came to learn about clean and healthy living over the next seven decades.”

  The camp had been abandoned in the 1990s, and infrequent attempts to revive it in one form or another had either failed financially or not gotten past whatever local approval needed to be secured. It had been, at least according to the tired-looking web page, unused since that time.

  I pulled out the map of Southern California that I keep in my desk to help me know where I am in relation to anything people mention to me. And I could see that if I were to plan a route between the spot in which I currently sat (which I had circled when I first got the apartment, the desk and the map, in order to keep track of myself) and Lake Arrowhead, it was about one hundred miles southeast.

  A plan was starting to form, and this time I was fully on top of it.

  Orange County was south, not east, but bits of it were pretty close to the route someone would have to take if they were driving to Lake Arrowhead. I left the map out and went back to my computer, bringing up the Langton corporate information once again. And, just as Steve had said, the LRG sales and manufacturing office was based in Orange County: in Brea, not far from La Habra. Back to the map.

  From the looks of things, Brea was only slightly south of the most direct route to Arrowhead. I thought
about this for a while. I knew that if I drove all the way down to Camp Arrowheart, it was most likely I’d find exactly what the web page had told me: a Y camp that had been abandoned for the better part of a decade. But I had never been that far South before, and a trip to the mountains sounded like more fun than staying here and brooding. And if, as I suspected, Ernie had jotted down the word “Arrowheart” because that’s where he was planning on holing up during his kidnapping, then bonus: I’d have a fun daytrip and find out what the hell was going on.

  It was true that, in his e-note to me, Ernie had included a warning: Alternatives could be unhealthy. But this had to be a bluff, didn’t it? I couldn’t imagine corporate Ernie posing an actual threat to me, except for maybe financial and how much worse could that get? And what was he going to do? Sue me? I didn’t think so. Anyway, if I brought Tycho along, the dog would get a day in the mountains while providing some canine protection should I need it. Especially from lizards, but he’d be company on the drive, if nothing else.

  Brea on my flight plan either on the way down or on the way back tied the whole thing together: I’d stop at Langton and somehow track Steve down and apologize and try to make things up to him. That idea appealed to me more than I knew it probably should have.

  I slid on khaki shorts, a white v-necked T, hiking boots and I brought a sweater: mountains, I knew, could be cold. Tycho and I were underway in less than an hour. Heading down PCH again, I felt truly happy for the first time in days. I felt powerful and optimistic and, most of all, I felt like I was doing something. In retrospect, I guess I also felt a little smug. Again. Why didn’t I know better?

  Chapter Seventeen

  At Tyler’s party, between networking with Emily and chatting quietly with Alex, I was talking to this guy. Ned or Ted or Fred. Some kind of “ed” name, anyway. He was a favored key grip or camera guy or some other behind-the-scenes person. He was a rarity: a native Angeleno. He told me he’d been born in Hancock Park — I remember that part — and that he now lived in one of the beach communities, though which one slips my mind. Obviously, he didn’t make a strong impression on me overall, but I do remember one thing he told me. It was about his first trip to the Redwood Forest, when he was thirteen. He said he’d never been out of the city much before that, but driving through the forest in the back of the family sedan he was completely struck with awe. More importantly, he was suspicious. Suspicious of the forest. He told me he’d thought that the huge, majestic trees that lined both sides of the road were a facade. That if his father had stopped the car and his family had piled out and walked into the forest, after a few hundred feet the trees would thin and they’d be in a neighborhood. That there would be paved streets and high schools and strip malls.

  “How could you think that?” I asked. A recently transplanted New Yorker who, nonetheless, was born in Seattle, the official home of gorgeous trees. I couldn’t understand such a thought. And when he told me that, when the family had stopped for afternoon coffee and cherry pie at a roadside diner, he’d slipped alone into the trees and walked and walked and walked, believing that, at any second, the trees would thin and he’d find what he expected, I laughed aloud. But to him it was the trees that were unnatural. That and the peace and solitude that forests engender. And, at the time he told me, this wasn’t something I could get my mind around.

  And when you live in Malibu and maybe shop in Santa Monica, you’re not seeing LA. Both touch the ocean and whatever place the ocean touches tends to have its own kind of peace: a wilderness of water. Even my infrequent forays into other parts of West LA and downtown didn’t give me a sense of what Ned/Fred/Ted had told me. Maybe a taste, nothing more. But driving, driving, driving anywhere — except north from Malibu — to get out of LA, you begin to understand.

  Looking at a map gives you a hint, but it really is only a hint. Los Angeles, Commerce, Bell, Cudahy, Downey, Norwalk, La Habra… you see them first as names on a map and — if you’re from Washington State, or a lot of other places — you think in terms of what you know: that between each place there’ll be some type of physical relief. City followed by a thinning of humanity when you reach the outskirts of the city followed by at least a brief lull that includes some green and maybe even the occasional cow.

  In LA, things are different. You can’t really go west, of course, because you’d end up in the Pacific. And if you go north, you get clear pretty quickly because then you’re in Ventura County and almost anyone will tell you that doesn’t count. But in any other direction, you can drive for a long way and never get the feeling that you’ve left something behind and have started something new. The mileage boards will tell you so, and you’ll see signs that say things like “Welcome to Bellflower,” “Welcome to Alhambra,” whizz past, but nothing will give you the visual respite that a Pacific Northwesterner needs to tell her she’s left one city and started into another. It gets a little eerie, after a while. Like something from The Twilight Zone.

  So sitting on Tyler’s deck with a drink in my hand, a breeze tickling the eucalyptus trees and the ocean within visual range, I couldn’t begin to relate to Fred/Ted/Ned’s story. But today, with Tycho panting happily in the back seat, I got a good taste. You feel like it will go on forever, the desert of asphalt, the sea of car lots, the forest of industrial buildings, that you’ll never see another tree or lake or stream. I began to feel as claustrophobic as Ned/Fred/Ted had probably felt in the backseat of the family car, though in reverse.

  It’s because of all of this, I think, that I can be forgiven for writing my sighting and resighting of the burgundy Honda Accord off as my own paranoia. And all of those towns. All of that asphalt. The fact that I could have sworn I’d seen that Accord several times between Santa Monica and Brea seemed to me not even a matter for consideration. It’s not like seeing a purple Bentley. And to get to Brea I followed the Santa Monica Freeway — highway 10 — to the 60 East to the 57 South to the Imperial Highway and finally to the 90. That’s a lot of traversing. My last Honda sighting was on the Imperial Highway and then I was ankle deep in negotiations for which Brea exit to take and I forgot all about the burgundy car.

  There was no hint to announce Brea — no grass, no trees and certainly no happy cows. Just, suddenly, there you were in a city named for tar that is now home to a lot of corporations including the Langton sales office.

  I didn’t feel nervous today. I had a plan that I was conscious of. And I wasn’t trying to do any infiltrating, only intercepting. I could have just called Steve and asked him to meet me somewhere, but I knew it wouldn’t have had the same impact. I could see how hurt he’d been by my skulking out of his hotel room that morning in the marina. Plus there’d been the whole potential kidnapper thing. Then I’d stood him up in Brentwood. Since I’d been more or less going his way — well, less, but now here I was — it just felt like the right thing to do to try and surprise him. And now that I was thinking about him, I realized I’d like to be able to make him smile — at me — again.

  I didn’t pull into the lot, just parked Tycho in the next block in the shade of a couple of palms. I rolled the windows down so the dog would have air, but not enough so he could squeeze out if the thought occurred to him.

  Not far from the loading dock, I found what I was looking for: a picnic table with a metal bucket on it. Close inspection revealed I was right on target. The bucket was filled with sand and the sand was filled with butts.

  I’d come prepared. I sat down at the picnic table, pulled a book out of my bag and settled in to wait. I figured that, since this was a sales office and a manufacturing plant, a peaceable looking woman reading in the smoking area would not cause any raised eyebrows. People from sales would think I belonged in the plant somewhere. People from the plant would think I was from sales and it was casual Friday or some damn thing. I’d give it an hour. If Steve didn’t show, I’d go find a telephone and get him out here the old fashioned way. If he wouldn’t see me, well… at least I’d be able to say that I’d visited
Brea.

  I didn’t have long to wait. After about 20 minutes of reading, and just as the book was finally getting interesting, I saw him see me. And I also saw him decide what to do about it and I was pretty pleased with myself for thinking up this surprise visit. I had stood him up. I’d eventually gotten to the restaurant, but he had no way of knowing that. He’d already been somewhat hurt about everything when I last saw him. I know if our situations had been reversed and, after all of that, he’d called me, I would probably have hung up. But a surprise visit that’s extremely out of the other person’s way? That makes up for some stuff. And I could tell by the look on his face — flattered yet still slightly hanging on to injury — that he felt that way, too.

  “I just missed you,” I told him. I closed my book, but continued sitting on the picnic table. “Yesterday. The waitress told me. At the restaurant. I’m sorry.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Apologizing. I felt badly about missing you. But I had no way of getting hold of you.”

  “You want to go for a walk?” He said, indicating approaching smokers. I was relieved. Walking would mean talking and talking meant that, as I suspected, he wasn’t going to stay mad.

  I smiled at him. “I don’t know, Steve. Last time we went for a walk, things got out of hand.”

  He smiled back. “I’ll behave this time. I have to get back to work pretty soon, you know.”

  “OK. Walk me back to my car.”

  And he did. And he thought Tycho was an “extremely cool dog.” Tycho smiled at that (though he smiles at everything). Steve and I didn’t talk about anything — he had smoking and then working to do — except that he accepted my apology and we swapped phone numbers. I told him I’d call him later and then Tycho and I were back on the road.