Crack-Up (3 page)

So there I was in my bathroom, scooping pills back into the bottle.
 
Risperdal is a common anti-psychotic medication.
 
I could not—and I cannot—keep the madness at bay without it.
 
With it, the mystery of the naked flight attendant remained.

What’s happening to me
? I wondered.
 
Usually, if it was time to adjust my medication, I’d go a few days feeling agitated for no reason, or fuzzy-headed, and maybe Sarah would point out that I was brooding, or avoiding eye contact with her, or claiming that someone had it in for me somehow, and then I’d know enough to head for the psychiatrist’s office straight away.

But I hadn’t been agitated or fuzzyheaded.
 
And Sarah hadn’t given me any warning signals.
 
And I hadn’t been suspecting others of any dark, sinister plans.
 
Though I had to admit I didn’t like the looks of that new maid, what’s her name.

“Were you aroused?” Sarah asked me in the kitchen after hearing my bizarre story.
 
She was freshly showered and puttering in her white maternity dress, checking on the overcooked-smelling stew and dinner rolls, not looking at me.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, squirming on my stool by the butcher block table.
 
“She was stark naked, and very close to me at times.
 
All I lacked was a roll of dollar bills.”

“I mean,” she said, stopping, staring, “were you aroused
before
you saw her with her clothes off?”

“No,” I said.
 
“I was preoccupied with John Helms.
 
I might’ve noticed she was attractive, that’s it.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her tone let me know she thought I wasn’t being entirely truthful.
 
Which I wasn’t.

“The important thing, Sarah, is that my meds don’t seem to be working.
 
I’d better go see Doctor—”

“What did she look like?”

I sighed.
 
We’d been together long enough for me to now guess with clairvoyant accuracy what her next six or seven questions would be, and what my own answers would be too.
 
But there is no skipping ahead in a marriage, is there?
 
Husbands and wives have litanies of their own.
 
I sipped my chardonnay.

“She was average height,” I said at last.
 
“Slender.
 
About your age, I guess.
 
Dirty blonde hair.
 
Nice complexion.
 
Pretty face.
 
Kind of heart-shaped.”

“Tits?”

I shrugged.
 
“Maybe your size, when you were about fifteen years old, I imagine.”

“Ass?”

“Same answer.”

“Shit head.”
 
Sarah can’t help cursing a lot.
 
Not only is she married to me, but she’s also native to
Southern California
, where beauty is to be seen and not heard.
 
Or so it seems.

“Daddy!”
 
Ellie barreled in from outside, holding a baggie full of dog shit.
 
“Look, I scooped the poop!”
 
She held the baggie up for my inspection.
 
It was soiled some on the outside.

“Good job.”
 
I tousled her hair.
 
“But try to get it all inside the bag next time.”

“Okay.”

I took hold of the baggie with a thumb and a fingertip and a dainty wrist.
 
“Now go wash your hands.”

“Yes, Daddy.”
 
Ellie skipped off toward the downstairs bathroom.
 
I followed her bounce until she was out of sight.

“Was it selfish,” I said to Sarah, “bringing her into the world?
 
I mean, given the genetic risk—”

“That again?
 
Now?
 
With another on the way?”

“I’ve got to see Doctor Shields as soon as possible.”

“You said it would be alright,” she said as I headed for the trash can in the garage.
 
“You said the odds the kids would get it were what?
 
Six to one against—”

The kitchen phone rang.
 
Sarah answered.
 
I turned to see if the call was for me.
 
It wasn’t, but the sound of the ring had startled me into realizing that I’d forgotten all about calling my billionaire client back.

Yet there was dinner just ahead, and Ellie’s bedtime soon after that, and so I didn’t phone John Helms until the following morning.
 
What was the wealthiest person in
America
when compared to the most important person on Earth?

Chapter 3

My overdue phone call to John Helms the next morning resumed our discussion of an alleged spy who’d built a backdoor into some software.
 
He was a good deal more upset than usual about a potential security breach.
 
I promised to put an investigator on the case right away.

“I want those programmers grilled,” he said.
 
“I want them investigated.
 
Followed, if need be.
 
One of them’s lying.
 
One of them’s up to something.
 
And I won’t allow anything—anything at all—to go wrong with this project.”

“What’s so important about this project?”

“The client—a Wall Street consortium—will be using our software to query an extremely large database containing highly sensitive information of a personal nature.
 
We can’t be too careful with data like that.”

After hanging up with John, I assigned the investigator, Dale
Robo
Robinski, a new hire and recently discharged US Army veteran with about a dozen years of investigations experience for the military police.
 
Next, I phoned my psychiatrist’s office.
 
My regular, monthly appointment wasn’t for another fifteen days, but I managed to reschedule for the following week.
 
Then my life returned to normal, so to speak, until the middle of a business trip to the west coast.

At the time, my firm was nearly ten years old and prospering.
 
In regard to our personal protection unit—a kind of Secret Service for the rich and famous—we’d developed a sizable clientele, more than one hundred accounts.
 
Half of these clients lived in
Hollywood
.
 
One I’ll call Peggy Van Horne.
 
I can’t tell you her real name, but she’s a legendary singer and an Oscar-winning film star with a couple of television Emmys to boot.

She rarely sang live anymore.
 
She rarely left the house anymore, I’d been told, a recluse, at least by show-biz standards.
 
Her long-time business manager had let me know she hadn’t been the same since the death of John Lennon.
 
Stage fright and crowds had haunted her ever since.
 
But once or twice a year, she’d perform at a charity event for one of her pet causes.
 
On this business trip of mine it was an Aids benefit in
Los Angeles
.
 
She was a new client and, walking backstage at the Universal Amphitheatre before the show, I was looking forward to meeting her in person, even though I’d been warned her nerves were on edge.

“It’s just performance jitters, Mister Ward,” said her personal assistant, Malcolm, breathless from the pace he set us.
 
“We’ve been through this before.
 
Before you were hired, I mean.
 
So just humor her.
 
‘The show must go on!’ ”

“By the way, what exactly
is
a diva?”

Malcolm sighed and shook his head.
 
“After today, Mister Ward, I’d say diva’s just a four-letter word for a five-letter word.
 
Here we are.”
 
He halted us in front of a star-emblazoned dressing room door and knocked.

“Come!”
 
With one word, one syllable, I recognized the voice calling to us from the other side of the door, famous the world over, a soaring, sighing, sultry voice, a ménage à trois partner inside millions of bedrooms.

“Remember,” said Malcolm, whispering as he opened the door, “don’t make eye contact.”

“I’ll try to remember,” I whispered back.
 
“But it would help if she’s wearing something low-cut.”

Inside, we were greeted by an eerie shimmer.
 
But it wasn’t simply all the sequined costumes.
 
The entire dressing room, it seemed, had been Saran-wrapped.
 
The fruit tray, the deli tray, the vegetable tray, the juice pitchers, the unopened bottles of Evian drinking water, the Diet Coke cans, the Cristal champagne chilling in a stainless steel ice bucket.
 
The furniture too—the two sofas facing off, and the leather-padded rocking chair and its matching footstool.
 
All of it draped or sealed in plastic.

The great singer, wearing a pink terry cloth bathrobe, sat before a brightly lit make-up table, her hair dresser on one side, her make-up artist on the other, both men working on her with flying fingers.
 
Saran-wrap that must’ve until recently covered the make-up table sat on the floor nearby, a crumpled pile the size of a large pillow.
 
A small TV on a high, narrow stand had been wheeled directly behind Peggy’s head, so that she could view it through the mirror.
 
There was an old movie on, men-wearing-hats old, in black and white.
 
From the forties, I thought.
 
I heard an actor saying, “You’ll do as I say, see.”

Malcolm made the introductions.
 
“Peggy, this is Argus Ward, of Argus Ward, Incorporated.
 
It’s his firm protecting you now.”

Before I remembered to look away, I saw her using the mirror to assess me.
 
I stared at a row of gaudy wigs, capping mannequin heads, and thought,
Not many women her age look pretty facing a ring of 500 watt bulbs.
 
It’s good the men with the flying fingers have another three hours before the concert starts
.

“Pleasure to finally meet you,” I said to the wigs.

Ignoring me completely, she said to her make-up man, “That’s ghastly, Tony.
 
I’ll look like a glow-stick out there.”

“You’re right, Hun,” Tony said.
 
“We’ll try something else.”

A rap at the door.
 
“Come!” Peggy said.

Sandy Mannheim barged in, the stage manager I’d met only minutes earlier.
 
“Peggy, one moment.”

While they conferred—Sandy staring down at a clipboard, never Peggy—I paced in front of the dressing room’s plastic-covered sofas, aching to sit down, but a little worried I’d be scolded, or bashed over the head and mummified in Saran-wrap.

The Saran-wrap, along with the two plug-in air purifiers, humming in opposite corners, told me that Peggy had a thing about germs.
 
I saw nutty behavior like this all the time, working for the rich and famous.
 
Called it the
Just So Syndrome
.

Everyone had it to some extent.
 
The more control people exerted over their environment, the more everything was
Just So
, the calmer and happier they felt.