Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  “That’s bullshit,” Bluerock said suddenly.

  The visionary light in Dice’s eyes went out like a snuffed candle. He looked up at Otto as if he were seeing him for the first time. “It’s the way I saw it, friend,” he said.

  “Well, the way you saw it is fucked. You’re fucked.”

  Otto leaned forward on the couch and put a chilling scowl on his face. “Look at you,” Bluerock said contemptuously. “You puny little puke. You haven’t got the slightest idea what it feels like to be strong. You make your living preying on people’s weakness—praising them for admitting it, encouraging them to revel in it, twisting them so they think that their bodies are evil, that true salvation can only be bought at the cost of this.” He pinched his bicep. “Well, I got news for you, shithead. It’s a blessing to be strong. It’s a blessing to feel rage and to be able to express it. It’s a blessing not to be afraid to act on your impulses, to react spontaneously to the gross fucking insults and insufferable stupidities that people like you foist off on the world. People like you were Bill’s problem, fucker. Not Jesus and not sin. People like you, who took his money and told him how to live his life and fed him on drugs and betrayal and utter bullshit. You and Jewel and Walt and Clayton and Petrie and that cunt C.W., who gets religion after she dicks him over royally and then puts him in a spot that no man could get out of whole. You’re the ones who turned what was good in him into weakness and insanity. You’re the ones who belong in hell. I ought to break your fucking neck!”

  Bluerock leapt to his feet. He was so mad that he’d begun to spit. His forehead bulged as if it were horned, his face was a livid mask of fury. There was no way I was going to be able to stop him if he went for Dice, and Dice knew it. The preacher turned white down to his fingertips, drew his knees up on the couch, and stared at Otto in terror.

  “Blue,” I said softly. “Save it for Walt and Clayton. You’re not going to do Bill any good from jail.”

  He looked at me, then looked back at Dice, who was cowering on the sofa. Without saying another word, he stalked out of the room. Dice looked so relieved I thought he was going to pass out.

  As soon as he was sure that Otto had left his house, he got up and walked over to the phone. “I’m going to call the police,” he said. “That man is a menace.”

  “You better quit while you’re ahead,” I said icily. “You call the police and I’ll swear out a warrant of my own, for extortion.”

  “I’ve extorted nothing from you,” Dice said. “You gave of your own free will. I am a nonprofit corporation.”

  “You’re an asshole,” I said. “And if you want to remain among the living, you’ll get away from that phone.”

  He thought about it a second and saw the light. Dice went back to the couch and sat down heavily, a petulant look on his little-boy face.

  “And as for that promissory note, keep it under five hundred. Or I’ll send Bluerock back tomorrow.”

  When I got outside, I found Bluerock standing by the car—a lively grin on his face.

  “Pretty good, wasn’t I?”

  “That was an act?” I said.

  “Nope.” He got into the Pinto. “It was practice,” he said. “I like to work out before a game. I hit harder that way.”

  26

  AS WE drove down Anderson Ferry to River Road I explained my thinking to Bluerock about Walt Kaplan’s probable part in betraying C.W.

  “Why not take it a step further?” Otto said when I’d finished. “If you’re willing to grant that Walt set C.W. up, who’s to say he didn’t set Bill up too?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Kaplan wanted the girl silenced, right? So what makes you think he didn’t kill her himself and make it look like Bill had done it? Two birds with one stone.”

  “It’s possible,” I admitted. Only I didn’t believe it. There was something too terribly personal about the savagery of the murder—something that related to Parks alone.

  “Walt’ll tell us,” Bluerock said confidently. “He’ll tell us everything. You’ll see.”

  “You’re that anxious to confront him?” I asked.

  But he didn’t answer me. He had a peculiar light in his eye, although I knew that it had nothing to do with sin or salvation. I’d seen that light before—in the war, in the jungle. It worried me.

  “We need a plan,” I said.

  Bluerock looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “We got a plan, buddy,” he said fiercely.

  ******

  It was half past three when we pulled up in front of Kaplan’s club on Winton Road. Bluerock didn’t even wait until the car had stopped before hopping out onto the pavement. He was through the front door of the gym before I’d turned the engine off, the tail of his Hawaiian shirt flapping behind him.

  “Christ!” I said out loud.

  I flipped open the glove compartment, pulled out the Gold Cup, and shoved the pistol into my belt. It only took me about twenty seconds to make it into the club, but by then all hell had broken loose.

  “I told him Walt wasn’t here!” the acne-faced kid behind the front desk said frantically as I walked in. His ghetto blaster was lying in two pieces on the desk in front of him, its wire guts sprouting willy-nilly out of each end. A can of Pepsi sat on its side beside the radio, draining slowly over the desk and onto the concrete floor.

  “Where’s Bluerock?” I said.

  The kid raised one trembling arm and pointed to the gym. His face had gone pale to the roots of his red hair.

  I walked through the entryway into the gym. There were only half a dozen hard-core musclemen working out in the late afternoon heat, and all six of them were staring in wide-eyed wonder at the wake of Bluerock’s progress—overturned dumbbell racks, exercise bikes, curling stands. The bodybuilders stood frozen astride the Universal machines, like cast-iron lawn animals.

  I walked to the far end of the gym, picking my way through the wreckage. The door to Kaplan’s office had been kicked open, the jamb splintered at the lock. Bluerock was standing inside, hands on his hips, face beet red, a dark scowl playing on his face like a spotlight.

  “He’s gone!” he said incredulously. “The fucker’s gone!”

  “Where?”

  Bluerock shook his head savagely. “Out of town. Him, Mickey, and Habib. At least, that’s what the little faggot at the desk said.”

  “Let’s go, then,” I said.

  Bluerock didn’t move. He stared at the desk furiously and then looked around the little white-walled office, until his eyes settled on a wooden folding chair. Without a word, he yanked the chair off the floor, lifted it above his head, and brought it down hard on Kaplan’s desk. The chair shattered like glass, wood chips flying everywhere.

  “Feel better?” I said.

  He glared at me, the back of the chair still clutched in his hands. “Don’t fuck with me, Harry!” he said in a voice trembling with anger. He threw the broken chair against the far wall and pushed past me back into the gym.

  I stopped at the front desk on my way out. The kid had just gotten another glimpse of Otto blowing by him out the door, and his face looked windburned.

  “Where’d Kaplan go?” I said to him.

  He didn’t answer me. He was still thinking about Bluerock. I slapped my palm on the desktop, and he snapped to attention.

  “What?” he squeaked.

  “Where did Kaplan go?”

  “Out of town. I don’t know. He don’t tell me everywhere he goes.”

  “You want me to call that guy back in here?” I said to the kid.

  His face collapsed. “No!” he shouted. “God, no.”

  “Then tell me where Kaplan went.”

  “I don’t know,” the kid said in a pleading voice. “Honest to Christ, mister. He just took off, around one. Him, Mickey, and Habib. He said he’d be out of town for a few days.”

  “Did he have a bag with him. A suitcase?”

  “Yeah. A carry-on thing.”

  “So he
was headed for the airport?”

  “Yeah. He had some tickets in a folder. I guess he was headed for the airport.”

  “Which airline?”

  “I don’t know,” the kid said.

  “What color was the folder with the tickets?”

  “Blue,” the kid said. “Blue and white.”

  That sounded like Delta or People Express.

  “You better not be lying to me, son,” I said, glaring at him.

  “I’m not lying,” the kid said almost hysterically. He stared pathetically at the desk. “Look what he did to my radio.”

  I caught up with Bluerock in the parking lot.

  “If we’d gotten here an hour or so earlier, we might have nailed him,” he said, giving me an ugly look.

  “He may be back tomorrow,” I said. “We don’t know where he went.”

  “He went after Bill,” Otto said with so much certainty in his voice he almost convinced me. “He wants him dead, and tomorrow could be too late.”

  “We don’t know that,” I said.

  “Yes, we do,” Bluerock said. “That guy, Habib. He’s Walt’s strong-arm man. When Habib gets called in, somebody disappears.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He runs a karate school out in Blue Ash. Does a lot of weird drugs. He’s built like a refrigerator and he likes to hurt people. I mean really hurt them.”

  “Great,” I said under my breath.

  “We gotta find out where they went.”

  I nodded at him. “We will.”

  ******

  When we got back to the Delores, I set Bluerock the task of tracking Kaplan down.

  “Just keep phoning the airlines. Start with Delta. Then People Express. If you don’t have any luck with those two, try the other major carriers. We know he left within the last hour or so, so concentrate on outgoing flights between two and four.”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Tell them it’s an emergency. Tell them that you work with Kaplan and that you have to get an urgent message to him. Tell them that he left on vacation this afternoon, but you’re not sure where he went. They’ll take it from there.”

  “What if he used a phony name?”

  “Then we’re cooked,” I said. “At least, for the time being.”

  He eyed me coldly. “Next time, maybe you’ll listen to me.”

  “Look at it this way,” I said. “If we’d gotten there before he left, we might never have known what he was up to.”

  “We’d have known,” Bluerock said bitterly. “He’d have told us—where he was going, when he was leaving, and how much the goddamn tickets cost.”

  I started for the front door.

  “Where are you going?” Otto said.

  “To Deaconess,” I told him. “I want to know what those test reports said.”

  “Just don’t take too long,” Bluerock said. “We may have a plane to catch.”

  27

  DEACONESS HOSPITAL is located on Clifton Avenue—just about a mile and a half from the Delores. It only took me a couple of minutes to drive there and a couple more to park in their lot on Straight Street.

  I walked from the lot to the lobby and over to the reception desk, a long chrome counter with colorful graphics painted on the wall behind it. The cheerful trim didn’t disguise the hospital smells of disinfectant and alcohol, or improve the melancholy looks of the people sitting on the benches in the waiting area. The receptionist, a pretty little Chinese girl in a white nurse’s uniform, smiled fulsomely as I walked up to her.

  “How can I help you?” she said.

  “I need to speak to a doctor in your obstetrics department.”

  “What is his name?”

  “I don’t know his name,” I said. “I just know that it starts with A or P.”

  The receptionist gave me an odd look, which wasn’t surprising. I figured I could smooth matters over by making the inquiry look official. I pulled out my trusty Special Assistant’s badge and showed it to her.

  “I’m investigating Carol O’Hara’s murder,” I said.

  “The football player’s girlfriend?” the girl said.

  “Yes. She had a series of tests run here a couple of weeks ago. Prenatal tests. I’d like to talk to the doctor who ran them.”

  The girl consulted a Rolodex on her desk. “It was probably Dr. Ashram. He’s in charge of prenatal testing at our clinic.”

  “Is he here now?”

  “I think so. He may be in the lab. I’ll page him for you.”

  While the girl was paging Dr. Ashram, I went over to a bank of pay phones opposite the reception desk and phoned George DeVries. It wasn’t quite five o’clock, and there was an outside chance that he was still sitting at his desk, staring out the window at Mount Adams. I let the phone ring ten times and hung up. When I turned back to the receptionist there was a dark-haired, bespectacled man in a white doctor’s tunic standing beside her.

  “Are you Dr. Ashram?” I said as I walked over to him.

  He nodded. “Yes, I am Dr. Ashram. And what would your name be, sir?”

  “Stoner.”

  “Ah, Mr. Stoner,” he said, almost joyfully. “How may I be of help to you?”

  Dr. Ashram was a Pakistani gentleman and he spoke English with a merry, singsong lilt. His face was acne-scarred and almost as deeply pitted as George DeVries’s. His jet-black eyes sparkled as if he’d just heard a joke or told one.

  “I’d like to talk to you about one of your patients,” I said, showing him the badge.

  “This is what Miss Chang has been telling me,” he said. “Would you like to come to my office, then?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “No problem,” he said, and smiled a toothy smile, as if in the face of his own insistent courtesy he’d found mine rather funny.

  We took an elevator up to the fourth floor. I followed Ashram down a corridor lined with deserted offices on the west wall and with plate glass windows on the east. The windows were in shadows and the fluorescent lights overhead hadn’t taken hold yet, so the hall had the dim, crepuscular look of library stacks. When we got to an office door with Ashram’s name on it, the doctor dug through a pocket of his loose gabardine trousers and fished out a huge key ring loaded with keys. He found the one he wanted almost immediately, unlocked the door, and waved me through it, flicking on the light as I went in.

  His office was neat and modern-looking—a steel secretary’s desk and several tall files in the antechamber and a larger wooden desk and a half dozen more files in the main room. Several X-ray viewers were posted on the walls, and one of them had been left on. There was an X ray clipped to it. I glanced at the X ray—it looked like a negative of a summer thunderstorm.

  “I never could figure out how you can read those things,” I said, sitting on a hobbed leather captain’s chair across the desk from Ashram.

  “It is an art and a science,” he said in his fine, cheerful voice.

  Ashram opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a wrinkled pack of Camels.

  “It is a terrible vice,” he said apologetically, “but one that I cannot seem to rid myself of.” He shook a cigarette from the pack and fit it into his mouth as if he were screwing in a light bulb.

  “So, what do you wish to know, Mr. Stoner?” he said as he lit the cigarette.

  “Carol O’Hara came to you a couple of weeks ago for a series of tests.”

  “Yes,” he said. “She did.”

  “Why did she need the tests?” I said.

  “She had been referred to me by another doctor,” Ashram said. “Doctor Anthony Phillips.”

  “He was her obstetrician?”

  Ashram shook his head, scaring away the smoke that was hanging in front of his face. “Not at all,” he said. “He was the doctor of her husband. I mean, of course, the doctor of the football player.”

  “Bill Parks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why was Parks seeing a doctor?” I asked.
/>   “This you would have to ask Dr. Anthony Phillips,” Ashram said. “I believe the man, Parks, had a liver ailment. I’m not sure of the exact diagnosis, but there was concern that the unborn child might have been infected. I was asked to do some tests.”

  “And the results?”

  “My tests showed that the child was mongoloid. There were other complications, as well. Deformities.”

  “What caused these problems?” I said. “The liver ailment?”

  “It is possible, of course, although deformities of such an extent are usually genetic in origin. This is what I told Miss O’Hara.”

  “When did you give her the diagnosis?”

  “On Thursday afternoon of last week.”

  “Was Parks with her at the time?”

  “No.”

  “And how did she react?”

  Ashram shooed the smoke from his eyes. “She was heartbroken, of course, even though she had been expecting the worst. It is always difficult for a mother to face such a calamity, you know. Indeed, she was so distraught that her friend had to help her out of the office.”

  “I thought you said she was alone?”

  “No,” Ashram said. “I merely said that her husband—that Parks was not with her. She did bring a friend along, a girlfriend.”

  “Do you remember her friend’s name?”

  He shook his head. “She was a young blond girl. From Kentucky, I think. I do not recall her name.”

  Unfortunately, I was very much afraid that I did.

  ******

  Of course, there was no way to get in touch with Laurel until she arrived in Hawaii. And she didn’t have to be the blond girlfriend who had accompanied C.W. O’Hara to Dr. Ashram’s clinic on Thursday. Nevertheless, I was feeling pretty badly used as I rode the elevator back to the hospital lobby. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t demonstrated that she was untrustworthy. In fact, she’d told me outright that she’d do whatever she had to do to look after her own interests. Moreover, most of the information she’d given me was sound. I’d confirmed it through Bluerock and other sources. It was what she hadn’t told me that worried me. And why she hadn’t told me. Knowing Laurel, I figured that withholding information had probably turned her a buck. The question was, from whom?