Ron explained about Joe Greiner and his call from the Narco Squad.
“You mean they wanted to use my sister’s death to set me up?” He was incredulous. “Marilyn didn’t take drugs.”
“Maybe not,” Ron said, “but they found something in her when she died.”
“What—Marilyn? That’s crazy. What was it?”
Ron told him about the Halcion, and what it was for.
“So they were after me anyway. Unbelievable.” He shook his head. “You know what?”
“What?” Ron glanced over.
“You’re right. It could have been worse. Much worse.” He was silent for a moment and then said, “I still don’t get it. How did my name come up in the first place? I mean between you and your cop friend—hey, Joe Greiner, that’s the guy that left a card on my door!”
Ron turned onto the San Diego Freeway, heading north, and got off at Santa Monica Boulevard before answering.
“Remember I told you I wrote about your sister?”
Jeff nodded. “Yeah, so?”
“I thought there was something strange about what happened, so I did a little research. Joe helped me.”
“What did you come up with?”
“I came up with seven similar cases. Apparent suicides. Young. Attractive. Your name just came up out of the blue.”
“Seven. Jesus.” He looked out the window. Ron had turned on Westwood Boulevard and they were heading back south.
“I don’t know about the others, but I’ve got this feeling that what happened to my sister has something to do with that SOL group.”
“Yeah,” Ron nodded. “So do I”
He stopped at a light in the right turn lane. A small crowd stood around the entrance to a church on the corner. Someone noticed Ron’s car and waved. Ron drove along the residential block until he found a spot to park. “Try to put all that aside for now,” he said as they stepped out of the Rover.
CHAPTER 33
⍫
A freak rain spattered the coast on Wednesday morning—spin-off from a tropical storm battering central Baja. A cool, damp wind blew in gusts from the south, but by midday the sky was clear again, the August heat reasserted itself and the air was sweltering.
The Museum of Natural History is an imposing stone edifice, locked in place between the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Coliseum. The three institutions share a space on the map at the uppermost portion of that part of LA known as South Central, deep in the heart of the city.
Holly was unfamiliar with this part of town. The drive down Exposition Boulevard got stranger and stranger to her; as she headed east, the small but respectable middle-class homes gave way to a grimmer atmosphere, the ironwork on the doors and windows of the houses betraying a sense of siege on the part of the inhabitants.
It was with a feeling of relief that she turned onto Menlo and pulled into the museum parking area. The few cars in the lot were mainly vans and SUVs—family vehicles nestled in this downtown oasis. She followed a young mother pushing a stroller with a round-faced baby in the front seat and a pixie-like boy with curly red hair in the back. The heat, after her air-conditioned ride, was oppressive. She wondered why Art had been so enthusiastic about meeting here.
They passed through a gate into an open area with a fountain. A long truck, the size of a large moving van, sat parked in front of the entrance, deep green with dinosaurs and sharks painted in brilliant colors. She went up the stone steps and found Art in the courtyard at the top, straddling a large bronze tortoise in the shade of the building.
He rose, grinning, and came forward to greet her.
“Perfect. It’s lovely inside, you’ll see.” He took her hand and began to lead her to the glass doors of the museum, then stopped and turned toward her again.
“How are you, my dear?” He looked directly into her eyes, his tanned face serious now, the piercing blue eyes unblinking. He wore the cream-colored suit in which she had first seen him. His hand was cool to the touch.
“I’m fine.”
She started to look away, but he held her gaze and said, “Really?”
“I don’t know” she said. “I’ve been feeling tired a lot. Coffee just seems to make me feel anxious.” Then she told him about the dreams, and the false waking that was still a dream and how something seemed to be floating at the periphery of her attention, something crucial but elusive.
Art pulled her gently toward him and touched her briefly on the forehead with his lips. She could smell his cologne, the scent attractive but subtle. His shirt was brilliant white against a yellow silk tie. She turned her head and rested it against Art’s shoulder; a brief tremor ran through her but was replaced by a sense of comfort.
Art patted her back and then kneaded the muscles at her spine with his fingertips. “You’ve launched into a process of discovery. The subconscious mind is stirring—it doesn’t like to be prodded, and now it’s making waves in your conscious life.”
She disengaged from Art and stepped back. They entered the museum and Art showed an attendant what must have been a member’s pass, because they were allowed to proceed without paying.
“So it’s normal to feel what I’m feeling?”
“Absolutely. Growth is an awkward thing, and pain is the touchstone of growth. There are no free rides.”
“What if I just decided to stop?” she asked.
“Well, that would be like stirring up a hornet’s nest and then trying to throw a blanket over it. The hornets get enraged and try to get out so they can do some damage. No, Holly, we must walk steadfastly toward the light.” He took her hand again and they walked into the rotunda.
A series of beautiful photographs from China was on display. She marveled at the delicacy and power of each: the pattern of cracking ice in a winter pond, a red bird in a leafless tree against a gray sky, women and children carrying sheaves of wheat along a country path. Her heels clicked against the marble floor and echoed against the high-domed ceiling; the air was delightfully cool. Except for a handful of other visitors, the museum was pleasantly unpopulated.
Art led her into the dinosaur exhibit.
“Look at this,” he told her, pointing to a plaque in front of a fearsome recreation of a pre-historic carnivore.
The sign read: Tarbosaurus - late Cretaceous - 90 million years.
“Unbelievable,” she said. “Ninety million years ago.”
“Yes. It puts our human problems in perspective, doesn’t it?”
They entered another room, half of which was dominated by the reassembled skeleton of a Brontosaurus. Next, they entered a new chamber; a plaque proclaimed the emergence of early mammals.
“Look at this!” She pointed to a macabre gathering of skeletons, two of which stood about thirty-six inches tall, the other about half that. “It’s a family of horses. Thirty million years old.”
“Yes. The dinosaurs seem to have disappeared quite suddenly, and then the warm-blooded mammals gained a foothold. Come . . .” He guided her by the elbow toward the next room. “This tells the whole story.”
A series of panels, covering three walls, made up a single enormous mural. Holly contemplated the first panel, which described the Big Bang and the early expansion of the universe.
“Now we’re fourteen billion years back. So what do they think there was before this big bang. I mean, if everything was condensed into a single point, where was the point?”
Art nodded his head and clapped his hands together.
“Exactly. The point couldn’t be in space because all the space was in the point. Fantastic, isn’t it?”
The next panel described the cooling and condensing of gases into stars and the eventual formation of galaxies.
Following the progression clockwise, they watched the panorama unfold as the earth was born, cooled, and became covered with water. Th
ey walked on to see single-celled life develop, then multiply into more complex combinations and shapes, eventually becoming fish, leaving the water, and transmuting into crawling things. In another thirty steps they had passed through the great eras: Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and into the Cenozoic. She stopped when they reached the panel that showed apes on the left side, dragging their knuckles across the plains. In the center of the panel an almost-human ape stood erect, while increasingly human figures marched toward the next panel; cavemen, gathered around a fire, wielding tools.
“You know,” Art said, “there are those who say that this is all a fabrication, a lie inspired by the devil himself to lure man into a false sense of self-sufficiency.”
She noticed that, beneath the panels, there was a timeline showing the duration of epochs. The caveman panel to the end of the sequence—the next panel, depicting early civilization giving rise to modern man, the atom bomb, and space exploration—represented a small sliver of the entire timeline.
“Yes,” she replied. “I had a college roommate once, a born-again Christian, who counted the generations of the patriarchs and their ages, added them up, and told me that’s how old the universe was. We were theater arts majors together until she dropped out. She told me she had found a new calling.” She shook her head. “She wasn’t like that when I met her.”
They stared up at the final panel, with its depiction of machinery and science, its rocket launch and mushroom cloud.
“Did you know,” Art put his hand in the small of her back, “that in Texas there’s a place called the Creationist Museum?”
“Does it have dinosaurs?” She laughed.
“It has displays claiming to refute what they call the theories of secular humanism, Darwin in particular. The remarkable thing about it is that the curator and his director are both legitimate scientists. One worked as a geologist and the other was an astrophysicist. They too claimed that the earth was nine thousand years old and that the Biblical account of creation is the only accurate one.”
“What about the fossil record, sedimentation, geological strata, carbon-14 and all the rest?”
Art looked at her, his expression one of amused surprise.
“They taught you that in Theater Arts? I’m very impressed.”
“My first love was natural history. I can’t believe I’ve never come to this place—it’s so wonderful here.” She looked around the room. A summer-school class had filed in and now stood in a group in front of the Big Bang illustration. “So how do they explain away all that stuff?”
“No problem,” Art replied. His hand moved up her back and to her neck, which he massaged gently with his fingers. “They simply say that God, when he created the earth, created it complete with buried dinosaur bones.”
“No, really?”
“Yes, really. In fact, they welcome skepticism and challenges from visitors. I couldn’t resist.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I asked if they agreed with modern science about the speed of light, and they said yes. They also agreed when I asked them about the probable size of the universe, and the distance to certain known stars.”
“So?”
“So, I pointed out that if they agreed a particular star was more than ten thousand light-years distant, and that if the speed of light is constant, then in order for us to be able to see the star, the light that we’re seeing must have originated more than ten thousand years ago. Of course, that would be a thousand years before God created anything.”
“Hah. How did they get around that one?”
“Again, no problem. They said, ‘If God can create a world complete with living creatures and the bones of monsters that never lived, we have no problem with Him creating light in motion.’ In other words, he snapped the photons into existence as if they were en route, nine thousand light years from here.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she exclaimed.
“Ah, but is it any more ridiculous than a single point, existing in no place because by definition no place exists outside it?”
She pondered the question and realized that both propositions were equally bizarre.
“It’s a good thing,” she said, “that choosing between the two isn’t a critical issue for daily living.”
She had meant to be sarcastic, but Art took her quite seriously.
“That’s just it, you see.” There was an intensity now in his manner. “If the Creationists are wrong, and the Big Bang picture”—he gestured at the entire panorama spread around them—“is correct, then where did Spirit come from? Is it just some aspect of psychology—something mundane that evolved out of animal intelligence? Some historical development arising by chance in a series of random mutations? A function of the ‘survival of the fittest’ process?”
She thought, When he talks like this you don’t know what he’s after. Art dropped his hand from her neck and stepped sideways to the previous panel, gesturing for her to join him.
“Or did it perhaps always exist—before the Big Bang, in another ‘place’ altogether—a community of spirits, waiting in the wings until the naked ape stood upright”—he pointed at the center illustration—“until his brain evolved to just the right point, and Spirit said, ‘It’s time,’ and volunteered to join us and make us human.”
She looked up at the stooped, apelike beings in the left-hand portion of the panel, with their vacant expressions, their brute dumbness as they plodded rightward toward their evolutionary destiny, and then the central figure, looking outward with awareness, a sense of its own presence. She could easily imagine that something had descended from another sphere and inhabited the creature, and that that, much more than the erect posture, was the essence of its humanity.
“So we’re really made up of two things, then,” she offered.
“Four,” Art corrected. “Earth, Water, Air, and Fire . . . Body, Heart, Mind, and Spirit. The trouble is, the first three conspire to shut Spirit out—they establish Ego in its place and relegate Spirit to a subterranean dungeon, where it waits to be awakened.”
She turned from the canny stare of the Cro-Magnon on the wall to face Art. “How,” she asked, “is it awakened?”
“Ah, now we get to the heart of the matter. When the true self, or the Soul, has finally had enough, when it sees the futility of the domination by Ego, it must make a conscious choice. It begins to listen to new sources of information, as you have done by coming to meetings and engaging with me. It accepts challenges to Ego, as you have done by opening yourself to guided imagery and facilitated awareness. You see, Holly,” and here Art reached and touched her gently with his fingers at her left temple, “you are already in the process of awakening Spirit. Now we must dig deeper, and truly examine what Ego has wrought and the powerlessness you feel. In this way it is exposed as the foolish tyrant that it really is and, as it loses its stranglehold on us, new power flows in. This is the essence of Saving Our Lives.” He leaned forward and again pressed his lips gently to her forehead.
CHAPTER 34
⍫
You think I’m a candidate, don’t you?”
“I don’t know, Joe. We keep a few seats warm for guys like you.”
They were sitting in a booth in the back of a restaurant bar on Wilshire Boulevard. It felt strange, coming from the bright daylight into the dim shadow of the bar’s interior. It could have been midnight or four in the morning. Sitting across a booth from the detective, Ron felt as if he were in a stage set from his own past; the smell of old smoke, a bartender wiping down the bar, a few guys in suits sitting solo at the tables, nursing their drinks. Kenny Rogers played “Lady” on the jukebox.
“You know, I went to some meetings once,” Joe announced.
“Oh yeah? When was that?” He wasn’t surprised. Joe always seemed familiar with the lingo: easy does it, one day at a time, shit happens.
“Back when Janey and I were splitting up. I thought, ‘Okay, nothing makes sense. I think I’m the same guy she fell in love with, so what gives?’ She was done with me.” He shrugged his shoulders and tipped his head to drain his bottle of Heineken. “She used to complain about my drinking, so I figured, I’ll do this thing. I’ll do the meetings and stop. For her. For Robbie. For Christ’s sake, he was only four at the time.”
“So that was five years ago.” He knew that Robbie was nine now.
“Five years ago. Jesus, you’re right. But you know what? She left anyway. Nothin’ to do with my drinking. She had another thing going—another cop. Son of a bitch drank twice as much as I did.” Joe raised his hand to signal the waitress for a new Heineken. “So you’re keepin’ a seat warm for me . . . guys like me.” He snorted a laugh, but it was a good-humored laugh.
Joe was a big, powerful man. His powder-blue sports coat stretched tight over his shoulders and his hands looked like they could break things better than they could fix them. Ron was fond of the man, glad to think of him as a friend.
“Joe, alcoholism is a self-proclaimed disorder. I honestly don’t know if you have a problem with booze. I’ve never seen you act drunk, behave inappropriately, fall down, any of that stuff. So it’s up to you to decide if your life works or not, and if it doesn’t, whether alcohol could have anything to do with it. Then—” he sipped at his soda and set the glass down “—the question becomes, can you stop on your own?”
The waitress brought the new bottle, the green glass frosted over.
Joe glanced at it, then made a small smile and spread his hands slightly. He then picked up the bottle by its neck and, pushing upward with the calloused tip of his thumb, popped off the top and took a swallow.
“One thing does come to mind though,” Ron said.
Joe leaned back into the burgundy Naugahyde, cocked his head, and raised an eyebrow.
“When you and Janey were splitting up?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “What about it?”
“If you wanted to prove a point about drinking, why didn’t you just stop?”
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