“Dr. Elbogen, did Professor Linney ever tell you he was being abused?”
“I told you I won't discuss a patient with you.”
“Okay, but do you think he was being abused?”
“If I'd thought so, I would have done something about it, wouldn't I? Is that all?” He sounded indignant, and defensive.
Which made me wonder. “One more question? According to Margaret Linney's planner, she met with you two days before she disappeared. Can you tell me what that was about?”
Elbogen flinched as though I'd thrown freezing water at him. Obviously, I'd touched a nerve. But which one?
“Was it about herself or her father?” I pressed when he didn't answer.
“Have a nice day, Miss Blume. Please pay the receptionist on your way out. A personal check will be fine.”
“The police will be looking at the planner,” I said. “They'll be asking the same questions.”
“You can't leave things alone, can you?” His puffed reddened cheeks looked like ripe tomatoes. “You don't care how many lives you ruin. It's all about the story.”
I like to think I'm ethical, and I'd never deliberately hurt anyone, but in my profession I often trespass on people's privacy. So I'll admit his comment stung, especially in light of Linney's death.
It would have stung more if I hadn't heard the fear that quivered behind the indignation in the doctor's voice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IT WAS AFTER FIVE BY THE TIME I CAME HOME, AND THE ominous charcoal sky promised more rain. My landlord, Isaac, was out of his apartment before I shut my car door. He must have heard me pull into the driveway.
He looked like Big Bird. He'd tightened the hood of his bright yellow slicker around his face, hiding his forehead and throwing his beaklike nose into prominence.
“Your mail was getting wet, so I took it inside,” he informed me as I climbed the steps to the porch.
I was tired and hungry. Though I like Isaac, he can be chatty, so I hoped he'd hand me my mail. But he invited me in and I couldn't say no. The price of postage has gone up, I thought, and was immediately ashamed of myself.
I'd been in Isaac's apartment, and it's always something of a jolt seeing the hodgepodge of sofas, chairs, bureaus, and other pieces he's accumulated from marriages to three women with tastes ranging from Danish Modern to French Provincial to lacquered Chinese. It's like walking into one of those discount stores on Western Avenue so crowded with furniture and accessories that you can't really notice anything, and you're afraid you'll either bump into something and bruise your shin or break something ugly and have to pay for it.
I followed Isaac through the living and dining rooms into the kitchen, where he'd put my mail. I wanted to go home, peel off my boots, and curl up on my sofa with a cup of hot chocolate while I skimmed Margaret's planner. But Isaac offered me coffee, and I hesitated only a second or two before I said fine. He seemed lonely, probably because he hadn't been able to sit on the porch, watching people the way he does every day. Maybe he was always lonely, and I'd never really noticed. Maybe I was more attuned because of Linney and the old man in Elbogen's office.
So we sat at his yellow Formica breakfast room table, where he was working on a decoupage of a rose. We had fresh brewed coffee and polished off half a loaf of Entenmann's pound cake (Isaac always stocks up on kosher nosh for me), and I admired recent photos of his Chicago grandchildren and listened while he told me about the cute things they'd said when he last talked to them and how he was thinking of maybe going to see them for Chanukah next month if he could get a cheap ticket on Priceline.
Back in my apartment I checked my phone messages: Zack, canceling our date tonight because of last-minute shul business. He was sorry and would phone me later. My mom, reminding me that I'd offered to take Bubbie G for a haircut on Thursday. Linda Cobern, asking me to call. Who was Linda Cobern? I wondered, and then I remembered: the witchy woman who worked for Councilman Harrington. Served me right for giving her my card.
It was six-thirty. I pride myself on returning calls promptly, and Linda Cobern might still be at the office, but I wasn't in the mood to be harangued about my Times piece. Even the thought made me grumpy, or maybe it was the relentless rain that was fogging my windows and chilling the apartment, and Elbogen's parting jab, and the fact that I'd be spending the evening alone.
I understood about tonight. I really did. I admired Zack's sensitivity and dedication to his congregants. But I couldn't help wondering whether this was an example of what life would be like if I married a rabbi, and whether I was suited to be a rabbi's wife.
Or even a rabbi's girlfriend. At mah jongg I'd joked about being sexually frustrated, but though my clothes may skirt Orthodox standards, the prohibition against extramarital sex is one rule I'm not about to break. Even when I'd come dangerously close, telling myself that sanctifying intimacy was quaint but irrelevant, something had always kept me back. God, from whom I couldn't seem to run away; my conscience; the values my parents had instilled in me; an image of Zeidie Irving watching me from Heaven, his kind face filled with disappointment. So Ron had been my first lover, and so far, my last, and I wasn't sorry.
But Orthodoxy prohibits any physical contact between men and women outside of marriage. While I have bent that rule, and so had Zack (maybe he'd done more than bend it; he'd never said, and I'd never asked), he definitely wouldn't break it now. I respected that, too, but I missed being touched, being kissed.
Which is one of the reasons, I reminded myself, that strictly observant men and women have short courtships—like my brother Judah and sister-in-law Gitty, whose first embrace was in a private room after the wedding ceremony.
And I was the one who'd asked for more time, as if another month or three or eight would give me a certainty I knew didn't exist. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith.
I phoned my mom, thanked her for reminding me about Bubbie G, and listened to her vent about a woman who had berated her last night at parent-teacher conferences for giving her daughter a “demoralizing” A-minus on an essay that would probably “scar her for life.”
You could laugh or cry, we both agreed.
Then I phoned Bubbie G and confirmed that I'd pick her up on Thursday at eleven.
“You sound not yourself, sheyfele,” she said. “Everything is all right?”
The endearment (it's Yiddish for little sheep) and the concern in her gentle, accented voice were an instant balm. If I closed my eyes, I could practically feel her satin-soft hand stroking my cheek.
“I'm fine, Bubbie. Just a little tired.”
“Have a gleyzele hot tea, and then a bath,” she advised. As far as Bubbie is concerned, a glass of hot tea and a bath solve most problems. “You're writing about the man who died in the fire, yes? And his daughter? This is making you sad, no?”
“Very sad. And I'm having a hard time learning what really happened.”
“Der emess iz a kricher, Molly.”
Truth is a slowpoke.
I'd have to remember that.
Over a spartan dinner of broiled trout and a salad—compensation for the pound cake—I read Margaret's planner. I learned that she'd practiced piano three hours a day, that she'd played doubles tennis Tuesdays and Thursdays, that she had a standing monthly hairdresser appointment. I learned—no surprise here—that in the past months she'd spent most of her time meeting with Jeremy Dorn and the contractor and the decorator who had been helping her with the Muirfield house. On May twenty-eighth she'd written Talk to Linz. The tile setter.
She'd also been busy with her father. In January she'd taken Linney to a lab for X rays. In February she'd taken him to Elbogen, and again in March, after he'd had a second set of X rays. In mid-May she and Linney had met with an attorney to transfer ownership of the Fuller house to her. X rays, again. Later that month, three weeks before she'd disappeared, there had been a flurry of activity.
“Dad's party,” she'd written. A birthday? His retirement as chair o
f his USC department? Margaret had made all the arrangements: table, chairs, and linen rentals; florist; caterer.
He must have been more alert six months ago, I thought. I couldn't begin to imagine his bitterness and his fear, the knowledge that every day might bring with it more confusion, another fact or face or memory lost forever, a silent, treacherous slipping away from the world he knew into a dark, lonely place.
The page for June thirteenth and fourteenth was missing. I checked to see if Hank had stapled the pages out of order, then remembered: Margaret had torn that page out.
I scanned the planner again. Three sets of X rays in four months. I thought about that as I reread the last few pages and pondered the cryptic entries, brooded about Linz. Why had Margaret written Tiler if she'd fired the man two weeks earlier? And why, come to think of it, hadn't she written his name, the way she had in the May entry? Maybe she was referring to a different tile setter.
Something else niggled at me. I was in the tub with my eyes closed, inhaling the sweet jasmine of my bath oil and hoping the warm, soothing water would jiggle free from my unconscious the little puzzle piece that was eluding me, when my ex-husband Ron phoned. I saw his number on my portable phone's caller ID. A moment later I heard his voice on the answering machine.
“Something I have to tell you, babe. It's important.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Wednesday, November 12. 10:30 A.M. 6000 block of Cadillac Avenue. A man became angry with a woman at a hospital while waiting for service and threw a cup of urine at her, striking the victim in the chest. (Wilshire)
I MUST HAVE DRIVEN BY GOLDEN VISTA A THOUSAND times before, but I'd never noticed it, which is probably what the owners intended. It was a pineapple yellow, two-story stucco structure near the corner of Orange and Fairfax, a block north of Wilshire and in the heart of Miracle Mile, which was originally named for eighteen acres of empty land along the stretch of Wilshire between La Brea and Fairfax that A. W. Ross developed in the 1920s and turned into a prestigious business and shopping district. The “miracle” of Wilshire was later extended to Beverly Hills, where you'll find Neiman's and Saks Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive. Until I learned otherwise, I thought it was named for the medical offices that filled most of the tall buildings along Wilshire and have been moved to the twin Third Street medical towers connected to Cedars-Sinai Hospital or to buildings on Rexford and Bedford in the heart of Beverly Hills. But that's a different kind of miracle.
Golden Vista was across the street from a 99¢ Only Store and kitty-corner to the historic 1939 Streamline Moderne May Company building with its distinctive four-story gold mosaic quarter cylinder at one corner. (The building now belongs to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.) It's also a block away from Johnie's Coffee Shop Restaurant (run-down and defunct but available for film locations) and the Petersen Automotive Museum that organizations use to host events and where Edie's friend's son just had his bar mitzvah reception. A great neighborhood for bargains, cheap nosh, art, and nostalgia, depending on your fancy.
The facility was half a mile from my apartment on Blackburn and would have made for a brisk walk if I were so inclined and if the skies weren't dumping sheets of water. After finding a parking spot, I hurried down the block and entered through glass doors into a lobby filled with sofas, a table, a tall potted plant, and a Rockettes-like chorus line of wheelchaired residents, most of them elderly women. They returned my smile with glum stares, probably dejected by the downpour that was keeping them indoors.
Norm had been right about the wallpaper, a pebbled gray with a gray, yellow, and blue paisley ceiling border that spiffed up the carpeted lobby and linoleum-covered corridors. Through partially open doors I caught glimpses of a coordinating paper and matching bedspreads in the residents' rooms as Walter Ochs, his arm on my elbow, whisked me to his office. Along with the vinyl-and-paste smell of new wallpaper, I was accosted by the acrid odor of urine and something else that made my nose twitch and that I was content not to identify.
I caught glimpses of the residents, too. Many were lying on their beds, staring at those pretty paisley borders or a TV screen; some with their bare legs uncovered; some flashing a hint of blue diaper. One woman was moaning. A man was yelling for an attendant. Two female nurses were chatting ten feet away, but neither rushed to the man's side until a red-faced Ochs prompted them.
“We're short staffed today, so it's been hectic,” Ochs said when he was seated behind a utilitarian wood-tone desk. He smoothed what was left of his graying hair against the sides of his head. “If you weren't Norman's sister-in-law, I'd ask you to come back another time.” He was smiling, but clearly annoyed.
Norm had advised me to stop by unannounced—“If you want to see what a place is really like, Molly.” I wasn't scouting for a facility, but I'd been curious.
“I really appreciate your seeing me,” I said.
“You didn't say exactly what you needed to know. Something about a resident?”
“Professor Oscar Linney.”
“The old man who died in that fire.” Ochs sighed. “Terrible thing, terrible. I read about it in the paper, and I recognized the name. But he wasn't a resident.”
“No, but I understand that his daughter came to see you in June of this year.”
“That's right.” Ochs sounded wary, probably wondering where I was headed.
“Was she planning to have him admitted?”
Ochs hesitated. “I'm not sure I should be discussing this, Miss Blume.”
“Call me Molly.” I smiled. “As you said, he wasn't a resident, so you wouldn't be violating his privacy.”
Ochs straightened one of the photos on his desk. “What's your interest in Professor Linney?”
“I'm writing about what happened to him, and I'd like to get as much background as possible. I know he had Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I don't know much else. I'm trying to fill in the blanks, and I'm hoping you'll help me.”
He took a few seconds before answering. “I guess there's no harm. Yes, the daughter talked about having him admitted. We have a dementia unit, so that fit his needs.”
“Did she say why? I'm curious, because her husband said she was against placing her father in a facility. So I'm wondering what happened to change her mind.” And why she didn't tell her husband about it.
“Miss Blume—”
“Molly.” I smiled again.
“Molly.” This time he smiled back. “Most children resist placing a parent in a facility. They feel guilty. They want to take care of the parent themselves, to do the right thing. But at some point—and it's different for everyone—many children come to realize that doing the right thing isn't always achieved by keeping the parent at home. Dealing with an ailing parent can wreak havoc on the rest of the family, and it isn't always medically sound. So they search for a place that will provide their parent with the highest standard of care in a secure environment. That's what we pride ourselves on at Golden Vista.”
It was his spiel, and he'd delivered it with sincerity. It would have been more effective if I hadn't smelled the urine and witnessed the indifference of two of his staff. But that wasn't why I was here.
“I'm still not clear why she changed her mind so suddenly. Did something happen?” Something that would explain the two exclamation points next to the entry—unless, of course, Margaret was fond of exclamation points, the way some people draw little hearts instead of dots over their lowercase is.
“I don't think it was anything dramatic. She told me Professor Linney was deteriorating, physically and mentally. He was becoming increasingly combative with the caregiver and everyone in the house.”
“With her husband?”
Ochs shrugged. “She didn't say. A major factor was Professor Linney's refusal to move to the new house she and her husband were building. Basically, she realized she could no longer keep him with her.”
I didn't believe it. Something had happened. Another altercation between Linney and Hank? Had Margaret tired
of playing referee and peacemaker? Had she chosen her husband over her father? Reston hadn't mentioned quarreling with his father-in-law the day before his wife disappeared, but why would he? And I had only his word for his wife's romantic mood before he left for his business trip.
“I'll tell you one thing,” Ochs said. “This was a tough decision for her. She was extremely agitated, had a hard time holding herself back from crying.”
“Do you know if she'd decided to place him here?”
“Oh, sure.” Ochs nodded. “She filled out all the admission papers. To be honest, I was kind of surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people ask a thousand questions. They want to know everything: schedules, menus, activities, staff, therapy, visiting hours, home visits. I showed her around, she liked what she saw, asked me a few things, and that was it.” Ochs shrugged. “She was desperate. She wanted us to take him that day. I told her we didn't have a bed, and she got this look in her eyes, like she was going to lose it.”
Why the urgency? I wondered.
“People are like that,” Ochs said, as if reading my mind. “Once they make up their minds, they want to get it over with. I phoned her later that day to tell her we'd have a bed on Monday. She wasn't home, so I left a message. I never heard back from her. Then I read that she'd gone missing and was probably dead. And now the father is dead, too. It makes you stop and think, doesn't it?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ANGELINO HEIGHTS IS A TWENTY-MINUTE DRIVE FROM my apartment if there's no traffic. At four-thirty this evening it was more like fifty minutes because of a rush-hour snarl compounded by the on-and-off rain that made the streets slippery and drivers brake-happy and prone to blaring their horns, which pissed off more drivers and incurred more blaring of horns. At one point I realized I was one of the blarers. Reflex, I guess, or the call of the wild.
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