The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  Now that he was out, was this the noise of the boom dropping? Had the vanishing act been planned all along as well? Haven't you learned any goddamn thing in thirty-eight years, Sara?

  "Aren't you glad you can heal people?" she said to no one. The dark tea mimicked the deep brown of her hair, the mahogany of her eyes. Her hair was in a short, stylish, executive crop. She had been raking her fingers through it, contemplatively, and it stuck out here and there. She looked at her reflection and saw her tongue busily belaboring the chapped scab on her lip. She felt like trashing the teacup for the satisfaction of hearing breaking glass. But that would be acting like a nut. It'd only lose her the cup, which had a big, grinning white cat on it and was one of her favorites.

  Lucas had not called her. That had been the keynote of the evening, of the whole week. He'd gone incommunicado, and she felt jilted, left in the lurch like some high school muffin clutching a corsage on prom night. To make herself feel better, she'd made Lucas into a superhuman assassin of rock musicians. In all likelihood, Lucas was tending a campfire someplace, as Burt had said. And the killings, which the papers were already calling "rock sanctions" in anticipation of a series of them, were probably the work of one or more religious fruitcakes, folks who wanted to kill satanist rock in the name of their god. The sort of fanatics who made the patients at Olive Grove look not just normal, but dull. Lucas' problem was over; she'd helped him solve it. It was her problem that she had to deal with.

  It began to sprinkle rain outside. The Valley was thirsty.

  Dos Piedras was an upper-income bedroom community tucked just off Interstate 5, due east of Santa Barbara. A fifteen-minute drive over pleasant country backroads led to Olive Grove, where the hospital was, and most of the local shopping. The terrain around Dos Piedras was hilly and rolling, still mostly open. A glut of condos was working its way up from the south, and a lot of property was subdivided into generous tracts for the well-to-do. Dos Piedras's main lure was that it was not shoved up against anything else, like an airport or a military base or a microchip plant. It stood at a fair remove from major highway arteries and most urban interferences, which enhanced a sensation of calm remoteness and thereby lent the area its identity. Olive Grove's fire department handled most crises; the sheriffs, law enforcement. There was a quaint little cemetery almost a century old next to a church that was more a tourist attraction than a sanctuary for worship. Small municipal airfields were all around in Santa Barbara, Lancaster, Mojave, and private planes could often be seen dotting the intensely blue sky or making steady, buzzing progress among the night stars.

  Rough flying tonight, Sara thought, if the rain gets worse. It was pouring outside, battering her window-panes and blurring the view.

  Forty was creeping up on her like a mugger in an alley, and she hated the way she let it prod her. Lucas' attraction to her had been not only welcomed, but invited. So long as he was officially her patient, she never had to let him know that he was helping her, too. It was the safest relationship in the world-a secret, perhaps one-way infatuation. Now he'd bolted, evaporated with no forwarding address, and she was scared, and she reprimanded herself for her vulnerability.

  It wasn't thirty-eight years. It was thirty-nine years, two months from now. She thought of erosion, undermining her with slow inexorability. Hadn't her almost-forty years taught her anything?

  Sara had been on the losing end of a made-in-paradise marriage to another doctor, Spencer Parrish. This ideal union had taken five full years to disintegrate. Spence had always been more interested in maximizing his investments than in emotional gobbledygook that might hamper his progress up the ladders of the world. He had planned a corporation, not a marriage, and Sara did not want to play vice president. Mismanagement had killed Spence's co-op when Sara was thirty-four. She had been painstaking and careful, not rushing into matrimony while too young. It hadn't saved her. She still had to learn the same tough lessons in the same impossible ways.

  There was a card tacked near her desk at Olive Grove: The difficult we do immediately; the impossible will be done by morning. As she had discovered, the best way to learn how to do something was to do it wrong. The psychological weight of getting married had not rendered marriage immune to the rules by which she'd lived most of her life until that point. No fair, she'd thought. She broke, she healed, she learned.

  She had rebounded from Spence into an on-and-off relationship with a writer named Stephen Grave, who masterminded several popular paperback series-what he called "violence books," with calling-card titles like The Expediter and SSS: Special Sanction Squad. The sole condition Steve imposed on their relationship was that Sara understand his deadlines, and that sometimes he would have to work to the exclusion of everything else… except perhaps for a therapeutic fucking session in bed after another twenty-five pages had been laid to rest. Steve pulled a pile of contracts. He tended to hole up in his rented cottage, working and working, rarely seeing daylight, sometimes at mirror odds with Sara's waking hours. She told him that she understood and did not mind. They went to restaurants and to the movies in Olive Grove… and that was about it. She told him she didn't mind. She lied to herself. And Steve would nod patiently or murmur at intervals over the phone, until she realized that he was not really listening and was putting up with her in order to get back to his typewriter, where his attention was locked up. She finally understood that she did not wish to compete with Steve's endless writing. It was a bitch goddess that she could not beat. Ultimately she had fled. Another two years gone. To this day it was difficult to resist the urge to pick up the phone and talk to Steve; Steve was very good at talking and helping her get a handle on her fears. Even, she thought, if he really didn't give a damn about what frightened her.

  When her rebound fizzled out she saw no one for six months, then overcompensated. It was a textbook pattern she hated herself for recognizing. She shared various beds with several monied, handsome nonentities from Santa Barbara's upper crust. The Mercedes and the overpriced eateries and exclusive clubs got boring when experienced in the company of men whose sole purpose was the pursuit of perfect meat, the cultivation of empty beauty. But it was a brief, comfortable time unmarred by thought. When she felt the need to plug her brain back in, she abandoned the fashion plates and retreated into her work at the hospital.

  Then came the affair with a co-worker. A professional entwining of smart bodies, to be sure. Dr. Christopher Rosenberg dallied with Sara for four months, then hauled stakes for a juicier berth in Utah. With no regrets and no residue. He told her he was leaving exactly twenty-four hours before his departure.

  Sara's life settled into the structure of routine. Work. Sleep. Groceries. Fashionable lunches with Angie and Barb and Charlene. Barb moved up from Los Angeles with her husband, Vic. Sara smiled and was social, battling the urge to seduce Vic. She broke down and phoned Stephen Grave at last, because Steve didn't need preliminaries. Kept at phone's length, he proved to be a friend. When the itch got unbearable, she called in the guys with the Mercedeses. Rarely. More rarely as time clocked off. She had a quick and sordid fling with a friend of Barb's husband, a guy who had flown his own Piper Cub up for a weekend of think-tanking with Vic. The sex had been impersonal and hard, the way she imagined it must be for prostitutes. Another retreat.

  Then Lucas Ellington had come to Olive Grove.

  After a long time, she began to enjoy sending out signals and getting them back in measured, polite, cautious, and utterly unassuming new forms. Progress was achingly slow. That, oddly, had made her attraction to him more powerful. She had started feeling again. And now she was sitting alone in her house, depressed, pissed off, watching rain spiral down the leaded-glass panes of the west window.

  Once she had made the error of trying to dredge up the names of everyone she'd lain with since losing her virginity to Harris Taylor, Jr., in the backseat of a Buick during a double bill of Village of the Damned and The Time Machine. She had gotten her legal pad, scribbled Harris Jr.'s name at the t
op, paused to think, then scribbled more names. She decided heavy petting did not count, penetration did, and crossed off two names. The list grew. Some were only first names. One was no more specific than that guy at the Sinclair gas station. She wrote for ten more minutes before she faltered and had to start thinking hard. Then she crumpled up the list and fed it to the fireplace. There had been too many names she had been sure of too many times she'd needed human contact and only gotten a fucking.

  Her job was to help people with their problems, and she tried not to see herself as absurd. She permitted herself one irrational thought. If Lucas were standing before her now, she thought, maybe he could hold her, and everything would reassemble into some kind of sane order. That wasn't so unreasonable, so crazy, was it?

  "Be empirical, stupid," she said to herself to block the oncoming burst of self-pitying tears. "Prove yourself wrong."

  Almost fatalistically, she padded barefoot to the door, retrieved the yellow legal pad, and smoothed out the skewed pages. She rewrapped her bathrobe against the chill and tied it off. More exercise, less Italian food, she thought, finding the belt more snug than usual.

  Lucas's untimely escape had to have a seam showing somewhere, a clue she could exploit in order to locate him and finish with her fruitless and destructive theorizing.

  She could continue mooning about her house, eventually winding up in front of her bedroom mirror, opening her robe to spend a few narcissistic moments telling herself that her almost-thirty-nine-year-old body wasn't so damned bad after all. Or she could make a phone call and risk pissing everyone off with her somewhat extreme train of thought.

  On the other hand, what if the stuff on the pad turned out to be nonfiction? Another big question mark.

  Sara picked up the phone and called Burt Kroeger.

  ***

  "Too bad you're not wearing a skimpy, revealing nightie."

  Sara had no way of knowing that it was a typical Burt Kroeger line. It was the first thing he said when she let him in out of the storm, which had cranked up to a full blast downpour by eleven o'clock. The thought that' this compact, blustery man was looking at her body pleased her, but the comment was just nutty enough to make her cock her head for an explanation.

  Burt shucked his water-speckled topcoat. "My wife, Diana, joked about me rushing off to some illicit tryst in the middle of the night. She thanked me, soberly, for not lying to her. Then she started giggling. She finally had to go to the bathroom." His direct gray eyes shared the humor. "If there's a private detective tailing me in this typhoon, I was hoping I might at least get a peek at some cheesecake for my trouble."

  He shambled inside, and Sara slammed the front door, which always swelled whenever the air got wet and refused to fit the jamb without a fight. "I guess that verifies your identity," she said, smiling at the joke.

  "Oh. Yeah." There was a weary, hangdog expression on his face, but it was comic. "Allow me to introduce myself. Burton Kroeger, or 'Burt' as in 'just call me Burt, huh?' I'm glad to meet you at last, Sara. You're proof that Lucas hasn't totally lost his mind, you should pardon the obvious cheap joke."

  They shook hands, and she took his coat. "Come on into the living room, Burt, so I can get a good look at you. Coffee, tea, something stronger?"

  "Got any good bourbon? Could you put a slug of it in some coffee, not too hot, okay?" He stared gratefully at the gently crackling fire and rubbed his hands. His face was already reddening in the heat of the room. "Sure thing."

  Burt assayed Sara's living room. Near the doorways were framed art noveau prints from the commercial work of Alphonse Mucha. Over the fireplace was a large reproduction of "Girl's Portrait," from the Takamatsuzuka Old Tomb in Asuka-Mura, Japan, all sandy greens, oranges, and yellows. Varnished bookshelves supported rows of hardcovers. There were no textbooks in the living room, he noticed. The furnishings and drapes were comfortable and warm. A hanging lamp of stained glass threw interesting, watery colors around, and why the hell had he driven nearly two hours through a bitch whip of a thunderstorm to see Lucas' psychiatrist in the middle of the night, just on her say-so?

  You're getting a little crazy yourself, in your old age, he thought.

  But the answer was easy. Sara had said it was an emergency. A bit melodramatic, perhaps, but he had no reason to cite degree to her. She had told him there were things about Lucas she needed to know, and he had come prepared to answer questions. His own apprehension about Lucas' stay at Olive Grove was weighed down with unanswered questions, queries he'd dared not put to Lucas during their civil afternoon together, the back-slapping reacquaintance of old war buddies. Burt had come out into the night to put his misgivings about Lucas into a proper grave. Ever since Lucas' collect call from El Granada, something had begun to stink of decay. If he could barter what information he held in exchange for some straight illuminations from Sara, it would be worth the cold and the drive and Diana's loving gibes. He absorbed warmth from the fireplace and tried not to feel too silly.

  "Here. This'll put hair on your hands." Sara handed over a steaming mug. "I hope Jack Daniel's is okay."

  He smiled. "What a relief."

  She motioned him to a chair across from hers, but he preferred to hang out by the fire. She sat in her work recliner, tucking her bare feet beneath her on the cushion. The light stubble on her calves rasped gently together. She had spent Burt's drive time trying to magic up some way to open up the not-too-pleasant topics she needed to deal with tonight. Her sense of the dramatic -or melodramatic-had not served her too well as she waited for him. She resisted the urge toward meteorological chat.

  "Burt. How much do you know about Lucas's relationship to Cory, and to Kristen?"

  He parked his chin in his hand, looking almost stern. He was really thinking about the question. He was not going to obfuscate, she thought, and he has his own reasons. Firelight shone through his thin but fluffy hair. Sara could see the outline of his cranium, as though through excelsior.

  "After I met Cory, I saw her exactly twice, both times over a year before their divorce. Lucas was never fond of dinner foursomes, you know-two hubbys, two wifeys. Too much like a bad postcard of upwardly mobile Americana. He disliked that." Burt took a long sip and nodded to himself. "Cory made me… uncomfortable. Like I wanted to run from the room she was in. She was razor sharp, even caustic, and brutally polite to strangers, which I was, to her. She had a very superior attitude and enjoyed making people squirm. I think there was something in that intensity that attracted Lucas. We never talked about her, and I didn't like to ask how she was doing. She had one trait I know well: super-perfectionism. That's probably what drove her to kill herself. She could never live up to her own idealization of herself. Lucas did mention when she was pregnant with Kristen she refused to leave their house. She didn't want to be seen. She had Kristen at home, in fact. From what I understand, Cory never changed a single diaper. Baby care was something to be delegated. And you know what I'm thinking, just now? That maybe Cory knew she was on the way out, and had Kristen only so she could leave a piece of herself behind in the world."

  Sara doodled on her legal pad while Burt talked.

  "Don't ask me why their marriage lasted as long as it did, Sara, because I haven't a clue to that one. There've been wars much stupider that lasted much longer. I do know that Lucas was totally devoted to Kristen. As soon as Cory recovered from giving birth, she had an affair with a Porsche dealer from Westwood. Don't tell me-I know it sounds like a bad college joke. But that's when Cory probably entered her real drill-sergeant bitch phase." His hands worked in the air, futilely, as though wrestling with an invisible snake.

  "What do you think about the idea that Lucas may have helped Cory in some way to kill herself?" She had to tread cautiously here. She was accusing Lucas of complicity, opining murderous things about a man she was coming to love.

  "That wind blew past me. I heard it and ignored it. Pardon my Sanskrit, but that's bullshit in a bowl, if you ask me." Burt, at least, was convinced
of his friend's innocence on that score. "Besides, it's academic now. I think Cory was perfectly capable of 'setting up a rumor mechanism before offing herself. It's the sort of nasty, vindictive shit she was a pro at. I'm positive Lucas had nothing to do with her suicide. Positive." Repeating the word made him sound unsure.

  "Why, Burt?" She wanted to keep him on that topic without getting stuck in the quicksand of asking whether he was in a position to know the truth. "I'm not trying to antagonize you. But if you know something concrete, let's hear it." Sara the Analyst had shifted smoothly into gear. She felt a little ashamed; Burt seemed like a good man, and now she was demanding he prove it.

  "That's all I know. Sorry. Lucas just… wouldn't." Lucas had frequently mentioned Burt's fierce loyalty, and Sara wondered if that was what she was seeing now. As if it helped, he added, "Lucas just isn't a wasteful man, and suicide is wasteful."

  "Okay. What did you know about Lucas when he joined your firm?" This was an easier question. He'd be happy to recite history for her instead of addressing the ugly problems of here and now. He would have to sift a lot of data in his head, and this would give her time to assess what she heard.

  "Lucas showed me his portfolio. I hired him. It was a damned good portfolio. He'd been savvy enough to feel out Kroeger Concepts in advance, checking up on what our current projects were, so he could walk into the office with samples targeted directly toward our needs. Like the best people in PR, he knew his first sale was to sell himself. You might say we fell for his campaign."

  Target and campaign were military words, fight-to-win terminology. Words that were part of one of Lucas's most successful personality facets.

  "What about after Cory died?"

  "I remember asking him about a million times who he was going out with," said Burt. "He finally chucked me on the arm and said, 'Don't worry, big brother. I'm getting laid regularly, if that's what's bothering you.' But I never saw the women he dated. He seemed happy. Cory was gone, and I thought that was a good thing, and I didn't want to push it. He had loved her, after all…" Something dawned in his eyes. He looked around to nail Sara. "Now you're going to ask what effect Kristen's death had. Cory's death was a good thing; Kristen's was a bad thing, but he loved them both. How did he compensate-is that what you're going to ask? He found a substitute for Cory all right, but what about replacing Kristen?"