All or Nothing (24 page)

“When are you going to tell Bulworth what you know about Laurie?” she asked suddenly.

“I hadn’t planned on telling him anytime soon. Why?”

“Because don’t you think he ought to know? After all, he’s investigating the case.”

“I’m not employed by Bulworth. I’m employed by Vickie Mallard and her attorneys. I have no obligation to report my findings to the police. Yet,” he added.

She shook her head, frustrated. “But they may be able to find Laurie quicker if we tell them what we know.”

“You forget, Marla, that these are the same police who have put Vickie’s husband in jail, charged with her attempted homicide. They found him bending over her body, the knife by his side, and you half–conscious on the kitchen floor. The police
believe
Steve did it. And we have only a
theory
that Laurie Martin is alive and is the killer. You tell me, Marla, how we go about proving that to the cops because I’m not sure I can.”

“You’re right, I guess,” she admitted reluctantly, but Al knew that in her heart she was afraid and wanted Laurie Martin behind bars and out of her bad dreams.

“Come on, hon, I’ll make you some coffee at home,” he promised, scribbling in the air to the waiter for the bill. “And then I’ll tuck you up in bed and sing you a lullaby.”

That got her attention at least. “Thanks, Giraud,” she said drily as they waved good–bye to the waiter and to John Henry at the bar. “But I’ll take my coffee straight––with no lullabies. As a singer you sound like a hog being butchered.”

“And what do you know about hogs being butchered?” he demanded. And then he wished he hadn’t.

By the time they got back it was after midnight, and what was known in California as a “marine layer,” but which personally he still called plain old fog, enveloped the Hollywood Hills. As he swung the Corvette into his courtyard a small black dog skittered from under the wheels. Marla swung around, staring at it, and he knew what she was thinking.

“It’s not wearing a red bandanna,” he said. “It’s just a stray, or a neighbor’s dog attending to his duty before he gets put to bed in a nice warm doggy basket.”

But he could tell Marla was still spooked and it worried him.

Detective Bulworth was not exactly sitting around on his butt, he informed Giraud irately over the phone. And then he added, “But I guess you and the famous Assistant P.I./legal eagle are, because I haven’t heard one gosh–darn word from you in a couple of weeks. Surely by now you have something to tell me? Or is your investigation now closed?”

“Like yours is, Bulworth.” Giraud grinned, imagining the big man with his size seventeens propped on the battle–scarred desk and Pow! Powers bringing him yet another cup of the evil drink he called coffee. He guessed you could get used to anything, including bad coffee and Pow!

“Y’mean you’ve nothin’ to tell me, Giraud? I can’t believe that.”

“So what d’ya wanna know? That Vickie Mallard is still in a coma? That you have Steve locked up and that, unlike you, Lister is working his butt off preparing his defense? That you still haven’t found Laurie Martin’s body after weeks of looking? You
are
still looking, I assume?” He asked the question knowing perfectly well that by now the Laurie Martin search had been scaled down.

“Still no sign of her, as you are well aware, Giraud. Don’t give me this bullshit, just fill me in on what you are up to––because I
know
you and I
know
you must have something up your sleeve.”

Al stuck the ballpoint into his mouth pretending it was a cigarette and blew an imaginary smoke ring. He was laughing as he said, “And how d’know that, friend? You psychic now as well as one smart cop?”

“You’re just too quiet. You’re keeping out of my way and I know if you didn’t have something you would be bugging the hell out of me and my department.”

“But, Bulworth, why should I bug you? You have your man safely locked up in jail. What more can I ask of you?”

“Bullshit!” Bulworth snarled again. “You’re holding out on me and I know it.”

“You’re in fantasy land, Detective. Come on now, you’re my friend, would I hold out on you? No, we’re just in the same boat, wondering who killed Jimmy Victor as well as what happened to Laurie Martin. Quite a few unsolved crimes you’ve got around there, buddy. Better get back to your desk.”

He laughed as he heard Bulworth’s snort of annoyance and then the phone was slammed down. That would give the cop something to think about, though in truth Bulworth was a clever detective––he had known Al was holding something back.

“Not yet, Detective Bulworth, my friend. I’m not telling just yet,” he said, as he locked his office door and headed in the Corvette for the Apple Pan and a lunch of a piled–high tuna sandwich and fries. Marla would kill him about the fries but what the hell, a guy was only young once.

Marla parked in the hospital lot then walked through the steel–gray reception and took the elevator up to the third floor––and another world.

This was a silent floor, devoid of the usual human bustle and camaraderie. Nurses in scrub–green hurried along the shiny gray corridors, peeking into rooms whose doors were left open for constant vigilance. Inside those rooms patients in intensive care were hooked to monitors and drips, ventilators and catheters, their lives now totally dependent on others. Vickie Mallard was out of intensive care but not out of the coma she had fallen into almost four weeks ago.

Marla said hello to the nurses on duty, who smiled at her as she went by. They knew her by now, she was there almost every day, though she always chose a time when she knew the family would not be around. She didn’t want to bump into Vickie’s sister––and especially her daughters––because they knew she had also been attacked and that she had seen Steve, bending over their mother’s bloody body. It would not have been a happy meeting for any of them.

Vickie was petite but now she looked shrunken in the hospital bed. She was hooked to the monitor, but they had, at last, been able to take her off the ventilator and she was breathing on her own. A tube fed a yellowish liquid into a vein in her wrist, and a catheter supplied essential nutrients.

Marla lifted Vickie’s limp hand. It felt cool, cold almost, and instinctively she covered it with her own warm one.
It could have been me lying there,
she thought, remembering that awful night.
Me being fed by tubes, being kept alive while my brain, my soul, the real me is . . . who knows where?

Who knows where Vickie Mallard is right now? Is she dreaming about her pretty little daughters? Is she worrying about them? Is she going over and over in her lost mind what Laurie Martin did to her? Does she even
know
it was Laurie?

She sat by Vickie’s bed, stroking her hand, talking quietly to her, telling her things only she and Giraud knew. She just didn’t want Vickie to die believing her husband had tried to kill her. Vickie, at least, should know the truth.

“It wasn’t Steve, Vickie. I promise you it wasn’t him,
I know the truth.
Laurie Martin is alive, she is the killer,” she whispered into her ear. “Steve didn’t do it, Vickie, believe me. Soon he’ll be here with you, I promise you that. And your life will be back to normal. Just trust me on this, Vickie, trust me with your life. . . .”

But there was no answering squeeze of the hand, no flicker behind those closed eyelids, not even a sigh from Vickie Mallard.

Instead it was Marla who sighed as she arranged the pink and green parrot tulips in a vase and set them where Vickie might see them when she woke up.
If she woke up.

She dropped a kiss on Vickie’s colorless face, heard the faint rasp of her breath and thanked God that now she was breathing unaided. At least it was progress and made her less frightening to her children. And at least now she looked human. Her wounds had healed, though the scars still looked raw and in the event she returned to this world she would need extensive reconstructive surgery on her face. But she looked like Vickie and not like Frankenstein and that helped.

On her way out Marla was surprised to meet Ben Lister hurrying down the shiny antiseptic corridor.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, astonished. Attorneys’ lives were ruled by time––and their time cost money. A hospital visit was surely not in his brief.

“Steve asked me to come and speak to Vickie, since he can’t do it himself.”

She nodded. Of course Steve couldn’t: he was still locked up in the Twin Towers. She turned and walked back with Lister, matching his hurried pace. “What does he want you to talk to her about?”

His myopic glance flicked her way. “What d’you think?”

“To say he’s sorry he tried to kill her?” She knew of course that he hadn’t but she wanted to see what Lister would say.

His reply was a deep sigh as they stood at Vickie’s doorway. “He might as well, but he’s still insisting he’s not guilty. Beats me, though, how the hell we’re gonna prove that.”

Marla could have told him, but for once she kept her mouth shut. Instead she stood next to him as he looked down at Vickie Mallard in her tightly sheeted, neat white hospital bed. Lister looked deeply uncomfortable.

“Er, Vickie,” he began. . . . “My dear, I’ve come from Steve to tell you this. I was with him just a half hour ago, and he asked me to come here to tell you that he loves you.”

He glanced desperately up at Marla. “It’s like talking to a corpse,” he muttered, agonized. “I’m sure she can’t hear.”

“Maybe she can.” Marla urged him on.

“Er, Vickie, my dear,” he began again. “Steve says to tell you the truth, that he did not do this to you. He is innocent, Vickie. Innocent, he says. And he also says to tell you that we will find whoever did this terrible thing and they will pay the ultimate price. Trust him, he said, Vickie. Just trust him. And get well. He so badly wants you to get well. He wants you back again, Vickie, in the land of the living.

“And not the half–dead,” he whispered to Marla, backing away from the immobile figure on the pristine white bed.

Marla patted Vickie’s hand again before she left. “Trust him, Vickie,” she whispered. “Trust Steve and everything will be alright.”

But she wasn’t sure it would be alright for Vickie, ever again. Still, somehow she felt better that perhaps Vickie now knew the truth.

Laurie liked her new name, Maria Joseph. It was kind of a wordplay on the biblical names of Mary and Joseph and that made her laugh.

She decided that the sprawling suburb of Oakland, home to Berkeley University and its thousands of students, was a better place for a person to lose herself. Maria Joseph could slip by unnoticed among the masses. Besides, it was cheaper than San Francisco and there were plenty of places to rent.

The small apartment she finally found was close by the university, on a wide street with busy traffic. Her two rooms, though, were in the back, facing a small, ragged garden. The place was old with a thirties Art Deco green–and–black–tiled bathroom with a cracked washbasin and a tub–shower with a shower curtain stiff with age. The kitchen had an ancient Kenmore stove, and a Formica breakfast bar separated it from the ten–by–twelve–foot living room, containing an ancient red vinyl sofa with a matching club chair and a chipped glass and chrome coffee table. The other end of the ten–by–twelve accommodated an ugly yellow–oak table with two odd chairs, and the bedroom of approximately the same size had twin beds with cheap but new mattresses and a yellow–oak dresser with a mirror over it.

It was the new mattresses that decided her; most of the other places she had seen were real fleabags. This was a building used by students and she guessed she had just gotten lucky, that the old mattresses must have been in such bad shape the property management had been forced to buy new ones.

She sighed as she took stock of her new domain. The pang in her heart as she remembered her beautiful, pristine condo was like the turn of a knife. Somebody had to pay for bringing her down to this, she thought vengefully. And somebody would.

She paid a visit to the nearest JCPenney, where she bought towels, sheets and blankets, and a couple of white coverlets that she hoped would make the bedroom look more elegant but somehow only served to show up its shabbiness. She found a couple of cheap lamps as well as a few necessary dishes and cutlery and she stocked the refrigerator with bottles of tequila and wine, plus several frozen lasagnas into which she placed the remainder of her fifty thou––less the considerable amounts she had spent on living the past few weeks.

She refused to buy a cheap TV set, though. Never again for Bonnie Hoyt/Victor/Harmon/Martin was there going to be a twelve–inch black and white. Circuit City had a good bargain on a thirty–two–inch Panasonic color set that they installed the same day, and she spent that evening lying on the red vinyl sofa in front of it, watching every newscast for word of any progress in the case against Steve Mallard, hoping a trial date might have been set. And also checking anxiously to see if Jimmy’s body had yet been found in the canyon.

Nothing on either front. Bad news and good news came in pairs. Sighing, she downed the tequila and glanced around her dark, empty new home. She was lonesome.

The next morning, early, she combed every dog pound in Oakland and the surrounding areas looking for a mutt to replace Clyde. It had to be small, black and fluffy. It had to be
exactly
like the old Clydes. She was obsessed by it.

Finally, after a week of searching, she found a one–year–old dog that looked sufficiently like the original. He was smart. He came when she called, sniffing her hands eagerly and giving her face an enthusiastic lick when she bent to pat him. She bought him an expensive collar and lead, a red bandanna and a McDonald’s burger (plain). Bonnie and Clyde were reunited.

After that, she began her search for a church, one with a suitably older congregation that was also wealthy enough for her purpose. As always she was thorough in her research, first finding the names of churches, researching the demographics of each neighborhood, then going personally to inspect them. She drove around half of Oakland and its outlying areas before she pinpointed two churches, then made a point of attending a couple of Sunday services at each before making a decision. When she did, she knew it was the right one.