L.A. Mental

by Neil Mcmahon

  The situation made for a strange dynamic between her and me. In one way I was an enemy, with the power to cause her serious grief—in another way, an ally, with my own reasons for wanting to quell the trouble. I couldn’t overlook the fact that she’d helped set up the video of Erica—even if she didn’t know the who or why of it, she knew it was slimy. But it was a safe guess that Denise hadn’t had much in the way of life choices, had gotten too used to men pushing her around—with Nick a prime example—and now she was getting older and doing what she could to get by. And tawdry though it all was, I got the odd sense that she really did care for him.

  I didn’t see any clear direction to go next. But the parking space I’d rented had a decent view of the beach and was even in the shade, so I decided to spend a few more minutes there trying to put things together. I rolled down the Cruiser’s windows, got a notepad and pen, and started on a list of the major points that had turned up so far.

  Nick’s meltdown and his fall off the cliff. Was it a psychotic episode, or was there an outside cause? The dope he’d been doing was the first obvious possibility, and Dr. Shin at UCLA had found an additive she’d never seen before; she thought it was nanoparticles. Thousands of them would have gotten lodged in his brain via inhalation. But they weren’t chemically active, and she didn’t see how that would have affected his behavior; probably they’d just gotten in the mix somehow during the manufacturing process.

  Nick had gotten a VoIP cell phone call just before he went completely berserk and attacked me, and quite a few similar calls during the previous days, many at odd times. I didn’t see how those could have contributed directly to his breakdown, either, but maybe they had indirectly. I suspected that they figured into whatever scam he was running, and the calls might have been threats or some other tightening vise. But I had no idea what the scam was, and tracing the calls was next to impossible.

  He was sitting on a lot of cash. It seemed likely that had come—along with the cocaine—from the woman on the motorcycle. She’d later returned and broken in, probably to try to recover it. But as Denise had pointed out, why had she delivered both drugs and money to him in the first place? There was no exchange of one for the other—it was more like she was paying him for something, using both as forms of currency. But paying him for what?

  The next couple of factors were, if anything, more puzzling still. Nick had arranged and paid for DNA paternity tests for three unknown individuals and hidden them carefully. Clearly, they were important to him.

  Then there was the sex video of Erica, which I now knew for sure he’d also arranged. It was tough to believe that he was capable of doing that to his own sister, but I had to admit that he was. It would have required an elaborate setup and another chunk of cash—like the DNA tests, this was important to him—which would have made sense if the object was blackmail. But while the phone call he’d made to her smacked of that, he hadn’t demanded money or anything else tangible—he’d warned her not to interfere with something unspecified.

  Finally, Nick had a scheme going with Hap Rasmussen. This might be unrelated, although the timing and the sudden about-face after their years of antagonism were suspect—especially if Hap was in money trouble.

  I sat there a couple of minutes longer, watching the Venice Beach show and pushing it all around in my head. Nick going berserk. Coke laced with nanoparticles. VoIP phone calls. A pile of cash. Paternity tests. Sleazy video of our sister. Hap. Christ, how could Hap and Erica both even fit into this? They were worlds apart, with no connection except the casual family acquaintance. What could the paternity tests have to do with either of them, or with any of the rest of it? And on and on.

  Well, at least I had a better handle on what I didn’t know.

  Now I had to face the bitter task of bringing my mother up to speed. It was going to give another twist to her already ravaged heart. But if I tried to keep it from her, she’d find out anyway, and that would only make it worse. I decided to get it over with. I took out my phone and called her.

  With her unerring maternal prescience, she put her finger right on a sore spot as soon as I said hello.

  “I’ve been trying to get hold of Hap, but he doesn’t answer,” she said. “I’m starting to get worried—thinking maybe I should go check on him.”

  “Stay put, Mom. I’m going to come over. I’ve got some news that figures in.”

  Twenty-Seven

  When I got to her house, she was sitting out on the porch with a pitcher of martinis that was a drink or two down. I didn’t blame her a bit, and with any luck, it would help to cushion the blow. In fact, I’d have loved to join her, but I didn’t feel I could afford to start letting down right now.

  “What can I get you, dear?” she said.

  “I’m okay—you relax.” I sat across the table from her. She sipped her drink, with her eyebrows raised inquiringly. Well?

  “I lied to you,” I said. “This isn’t just more of the same. I’d rather not tell you this—I’d rather not know it myself.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “The reason Hap’s not answering is that he flew to Indonesia yesterday.”

  Her mouth opened in dismay. “He did what? Just like that, without saying anything?”

  “I’m afraid he might have a good reason. Did he ever say anything to you about money problems?”

  “Well—nothing in detail, but I did get that sense. He’d been borrowing from me, a few thousand here and there. But he made it sound like it was just to tide him over through a shortfall.”

  I exhaled, then went ahead and laid it down.

  “Nick was running some kind of money scam,” I said. “I don’t know what, but not his usual nickel-dime stuff. I think it’s big and ugly—and I’ve got a feeling Hap’s in on it.”

  If I ever had to invent a curse along the lines of, May you live in interesting times, it would go, May you someday have to tell your mother what I just told mine. She stared at me, then lowered her face into her hands. I got up and stepped over to her. But I was finding out that Audrey was made of sterner stuff than I’d realized. She came back up dry-eyed, even managing a shaky smile.

  “I’m trying to decide which one of them to kill first,” she said.

  I sagged a little with relief, then leaned down and kissed the top of her head.

  “Take your pick—but leave the other one for me, okay?” I sat again and filled her glass from the martini pitcher.

  “How could that happen?” she said. “They loathe each other. They haven’t talked in years.”

  “They’ve been talking plenty these last few weeks. Nick called Erica, too, and lied to me about it.”

  My mother took another measured sip of her drink. “All right, tell me the rest,” she said. “I know you’ve been trying to shield me, Tom, and it’s sweet. Funny how that works—when kids are young, it’s the parents who do it. Then it turns the other way around. But now, ‘sweet’ is off the table.”

  I did, picking up the thread from the time I’d left here yesterday, gone to Nick’s house, and found the drugs and cash—along with the DNA paternity tests.

  “I need to get an expert to look at them,” I said. “The only thing I could tell was that two of them seemed to have the same father, but the third was different.”

  But then I paused. Audrey’s face had started taking on a peculiar expression that wasn’t worry or anger or puzzlement. It was more like slow, spreading shock.

  “What, Mom?” I said.

  She turned her head to the side, gazing past me.

  “I’m hearing the rattle of a skeleton,” she murmured.

  Jesus wept—my mother? The one person in all this whom I’d assumed was pristine?

  “Okay, enough,” I said. “Time for you to come clean with me.”

  She rose a little unsteadily to her feet. I got up again to brace her, but she waved me away.

  “Just give me a minute.” She went to the porch railing, grasping it with both hands and lean
ing forward like an old-time sailor’s wife on a widow’s walk, watching the sea for his returning ship.

  I stayed where I was, waiting.

  “Things do catch up with us, don’t they?” she said. “I always thought it would. But my God, what a bizarre way for it to happen.”

  “Then it should fit right in with everything else,” I said.

  “I’m getting there, hon. I’m not trying to be dramatic. It’s just hard to say.” She shook her head almost dreamily. “I had an affair, Tom. After you and Nick were born. The two of you have the same father, just like you always thought. So does Erica. But not Paul.”

  When that one hit home, my feet just about left the floor.

  “I have to think that’s what those tests are about,” my mother said. “Nick must have found out and wanted proof.” She was still standing there gripping the rail and looking forlorn. I recovered enough to step over to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She leaned her head against me gratefully.

  “Who was the man?” I said.

  She turned her face toward me, and I thought I saw in her eyes, along with the sorrow of all that this meant, a great relief at finally laying the burden down.

  “That’s what made this fall into place for me,” she said. “He’s the only other person who ever knew—the only one who could have told Nick. It was Hap, darling. Paul’s real father is Hap.”

  Twenty-Eight

  I stayed with Audrey for another hour, coaxing the rest of the story out of her while she downed another couple of drinks. Now I really wanted to climb into the martini pitcher myself, but staying clear-minded was that much more important. Eventually, she started to wind down, and I convinced her that she needed to rest. I walked her inside, got her settled on a couch, and covered her with a blanket. Then I went back out into the sunlight and just stood there, soaking it up as if it could reach deep into me and brighten my heart.

  Well, there it was, the key to the puzzle—a secret hidden in my mother’s demure bosom all these years, that I’d grown up right beside and never had the faintest hint of. Now the pieces were snapping together with almost dizzying speed—and it was a grim little picture emerging.

  The roots went back more than thirty years, to early in my parents’ marriage. My father was a powerful man who believed that as long as he supported his family well, he had the right to a private life away from us, including other women. My mother knew but had no choice except to suffer it quietly or leave him. And with Nick and me to care for, both of us still tykes, that wasn’t in the cards.

  But the old man’s infidelities made her feel justified in thinking about a private life of her own—there was an element of revenge, she admitted—and her eye started focusing on Hap. At first glance he seemed like an odd choice; but they’d been close, affectionate friends for years, he was gorgeous, and even his being gay added to the intrigue.

  “It was a challenge,” she had told me. “I think a lot of women feel that draw at some point—am I attractive enough to turn him around?”

  Hap was willing to experiment, but no real chemistry ever developed, and the affair didn’t last long. They managed to come out of it with their affection intact.

  And with Paul on the way.

  Audrey was still sleeping with my father through that time, and no one, including him, ever suspected that the child wasn’t his. No one ever would have—except Hap.

  There was no telling yet how he and Nick had hooked up. I could envision a scenario where they’d run into each other by chance. Nick was always on the lookout for money, and he knew that Hap’s hatred for him was really love-hate still smoldering under the bitterness. He’d homed in on that, thinking he could use it to bilk Hap. It turned out to be a bust because Hap was on thin ice himself. But it gave them a common interest, and the Crandall fortune, maddeningly close to them both, was an obvious target.

  Somehow in the mix, Hap confessed the secret about Paul. That was when things turned ugly. My guess was that Hap was essentially a dupe, lured in by Nick’s manipulation, with Nick using him like he used everyone else. Hap was implicated, no doubt—already nervous and more so as things got more serious, and finally scared enough to leave town. It was almost more saddening than angering that he would sink so low, and right now he was probably feeling about as miserable as a human being could get.

  But the driving force behind the scheme was Nick; it had his stamp all over it.

  And what it came down to was blackmail.

  Paul was illegitimate. If that became known, his claim to any inheritance—any share or control of family assets, money, property—would be in jeopardy or even entirely void. There’d be long and tangled court battles where the only winners were the lawyers, with spin-off litigation from business partners, relatives who felt that they now had a claim, and so on. Paul would be devastated financially, and almost worse, he’d lose the cachet he’d been riding on all his life, of being the scion of the Crandall family and fortune. All in all, he’d be shattered.

  Nick had decided that this was his ticket back into the family money—to approach Paul and threaten to take him down unless Paul opened the coffers. Without doubt, Nick’s rage at being thrown out of the Malibu house added a vicious edge, and I wondered if he’d demanded its return as part of the deal. It might be why he’d made that addled claim to me that he still lived there.

  First, Nick made impressively careful preparations. He got the paternity tests done to prove Paul’s illegitimacy. He’d easily have pilfered DNA samples from Dad, Paul, and me—a few strands of hair, one of the old man’s sweat-soaked golf hats, even a licked envelope would do.

  Of course Nick had intended for the dealings and the payoffs to be secret, but he was canny enough to realize that this might come to the family’s attention. Paul would have to come up with a lot of money, and while he’d try to conceal it, he was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Nick figured that if Audrey or I found out—enraged though we’d be—he could handle us. We might make him back off, but we wouldn’t take it public or send him to prison. To him, that was a risk worth taking.

  But Erica was a different story. If she copped, she was guaranteed to go ballistic, and the whole thing would blow up with her. So Nick had set up the sleazy video and given her a warning. She didn’t understand it, but she would have if push had come to shove—cross him, and personal disaster for her was only a few clicks of a mouse away.

  Then he’d made his pitch to Paul. It wasn’t clear how far things had gone, but my guess was that Paul had caved and made at least one payment to Nick, the cash and drugs I’d found at his house.

  Well, if I looked at it gimlet-eyed, I had to say that Nick’s bad luck was the family’s good luck—his breakdown had saved us a lot of damage. I felt sorry as hell for Paul, although he was not the soul of sensitivity and his worries about losing money and status would outweigh any emotional shock. I recalled his stunned look of relief when I’d told him about Nick’s amnesia, and now I understood that, too; he was off the hook, or at least so he thought.

  The best course I could see from here was to clamp the lid on tight. Audrey would take the secret to her grave, and so would I. The last thing in the world Paul wanted was exposure, and the same was true of Hap. Erica had no inkling about any of it, and with luck, she never would.

  As for Nick, I had no hesitations about how to handle him—tell him flat out that I knew what he’d done, and I knew he remembered a lot more about it than he was letting on, but he’d better fucking forget that it ever happened. If I ever heard another whisper about it or anything like it, I would personally turn him in to the police.

  But there was still plenty to worry about, starting with the possibility that other people knew about this and might try to exploit it for their own profit. The female motorcycle rider, for instance. She might not know what the payment was for, but then again, she had to be someone Paul knew and trusted reasonably well, and he was a big talker, particularly when he was nervous. It seemed cle
ar that she was at home with crime; besides the drug delivery angle, she’d pulled a B and E. Another troubling wrinkle was the thought that she might have been double-crossing Paul—that she wasn’t trying to recover the stuff for him, but he didn’t even know about the break-in and she intended to keep it herself.

  The other candidate at the top of that list was Paul’s new squeeze, Cynthia Trask.

  And as that thought crossed my mind, the connection came like a lightning flash.

  The motorcycle babe was Cynthia Trask.

  Everything fit to a T—her relationship with Paul, her physical appearance, even the chill factor that Denise had described. That meant she damned well did know what was going on—and that brought me another sudden near certainty. When she’d ransacked Nick’s house, she wasn’t looking for the money and dope. At that time, only a few hours after his fall, it still looked like he might die or be seriously brain-damaged—and Cynthia wanted to destroy those paternity tests before somebody else might stumble across them. Then the threat to Paul would have disappeared.

  For all the bad bullshit involved, I’d had a lot of luck, too—Nick’s taking unusual care to hide the DNA charts, my thinking to look for them in the old desk, then finding the further links that helped me make sense of this—and now I realized that in a backhanded way, here was another touch of it. If Cynthia got troublesome, I just might be able to cause her some trouble, too.

  Before I left my mother’s place, I went back inside to check on her. She looked like she was resting comfortably; she didn’t open her eyes, but she must have heard me.

  “I’m all right—you run along,” she murmured. “I know you have a lot on your mind.”

  No argument there. But I felt that I was starting to close my fist on something besides thin air.