Silent Partner (9 page)

My diploma said I was a doctor of the mind, a sage at twenty four, grand arbiter of relationships. But relationships still scared me. Women still scared me. Since adolescence I'd indentured myself to a regimen of study, work, more study, struggling to pull myself up out of blue-collar purgatory and expecting the human factor to fall into place along with my career goals. But new goals kept

popping up and at twenty four I was still pulling, my social life limited to casual encounters, mandatory, calis-thenic sex.

My last date had been more than two months ago—a brief misadventure with a pretty blond neonatology intern from Kansas who asked me out as we stood in the cafeteria line at the hospital. She suggested the restaurant, paid for her own meal, invited herself to my apartment, immediately sprawled on the couch, popped a Quaalude, and got peevish when I refused to take one. A moment later the peevishness was forgotten and she was buck-naked, grinning and pointing to her crotch: "This is L.A., Buster. Eat pussy."

Two months.

Now here I was, sitting opposite a demure beauty who made me feel like Einstein and wiped her mouth even when it was clean. I drank her in. In the candle-in-chianti-bottle light of the pizza joint, everything she did seemed special: spurning beer for 7-Up, laughing like a kid at the misfortunes of Wile E. Coyote, twirling strands of hot cheese around her finger before taking them between perfect white teeth.

A flash of pink tongue.

I constructed a past for her, one that reeked of high WASP sensibilities: summer homes, cotillions, deb balls, the hunt. Scores of suitors...

The scientist in me snipped my fantasies midframe: total conjecture, hotshot. She's left you empty spaces— you're filling them in with blind guesses.

I made another stab at finding out who she was. She answered me without telling me a thing, got me talking about myself again.

I surrendered to the cheap thrills of autobiography. She made it easy. She was a first-rate listener, propping her chin on her knuckles, staring up at me with those huge blue eyes, making it clear
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that every word I uttered was monumentally important. Playing with my fingers, laughing at my jokes, tossing her hair so that the light caught her earrings.

At that point in time I was God's gift to Sharon Ransom. It felt better than anything else I could recall.

Without all that, her looks might have snagged me. Even in that raucous place teeming with lush young bodies and heartbreaking faces, her beauty was a magnet. It seemed obvious that every passing man was stopping and caressing her visually, the women appraising her with fierce acuity. She was unaware of it, remained zeroed in on me.

I heard myself open up, talk about things I hadn't thought of in years.

Whatever problems she might have, she'd clean up as a therapist.

From the beginning I wanted her physically with an intensity that shook me. But something about her—a fragility that I sensed or imagined—held me back.

For half a dozen dates it remained chaste: hand-holds and goodnight pecks, a noseful of that light, fresh perfume. I'd drive home swollen but oddly content, subsisting on recollections.

As we headed toward the dorm after our seventh evening together, she said, "Don't drop me off yet, Alex. Drive around the corner."

She directed me to a dark, shaded side street, adjacent to one of the athletic fields. I parked. She leaned over, turned off the ignition, removed her shoes, and climbed over the seat and into the back of the Rambler.

"Come," she said.

I followed her over, glad I'd washed the car. Sat beside her, took her in my arms, kissed her lips, her eyes, the sweet spot under her neck. She shivered, squirmed. I touched her breast. Felt her heart pounding. We kissed some more, deeper, longer. I put my hand on her knee. She shivered, gave me a look that I thought was fear. I lifted my hand. She put it back, between her knees, wedged me in a soft, hot vice. Then she spread her legs. I went exploring, up columns of white marble. She was splayed, had thrown her head back, had her eyes closed, was breathing through her mouth. No underwear. I rolled her skirt up, saw a generous delta soft and black as sable fur.

"Oh, God," I said and started to pleasure her.

She held me back with one hand, reached for my zipper with the other. In a second I was free, pointing skyward.

"Come to me," she said.

I obeyed.

WITH MlLO out of town, my only other police contact was Delano Hardy, a dapper black detective who sometimes worked as Milo's partner. A few years ago he'd saved my life. I'd
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bought him a guitar, a classic Fender Stratocaster that Robin had restored. It was clear who owed whom, but I called him anyway.

The desk man at West L.A. told me Detective Hardy wouldn't be in until the following morning.

I debated trying him at home but knew he was a family man, always trying to scrounge more time for his kids, and left a message for him to call me.

I thought of someone who wouldn't mind being called at home. Ned Biondi was one of those journalists who lived for the story. He'd been a metro writer-reporter when I met him, had since progressed to associate editor but managed to squeeze in a story now and then.

Ned owed me. I'd helped reverse his daughter's descent to near-death from anorexia. He'd taken a year and a half to pay me, then added to his personal debt by profiting from a couple of big stories that I'd steered his way.

Just after 9:00 P.M. I reached him at his home in Woodland Hills.

"Doc. I was going to call you."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, just got back from Boston. Anne-Marie sends her love."

"How's she doing?"

"Still skinnier than we'd like, but otherwise great. She started social work school this fall, got a part-time job, and found a new boyfriend to replace the bastard who dumped her."

"Give her my best."

"Will do. What's up?"

"I wanted to ask you about a story in today's final. Suicide of a psychologist, page—"

"Twenty. What about it?"

"I knew the woman, Ned."

"Oh, jeez. That's lousy."

"Is there anything more to it than what you printed?"

"No reason for there to be. It wasn't exactly a hot scoop. In fact I believe we got it over the phone from police communications—no one actually went out to the scene. Is there anything you know that I should?"

"Nothing at all. Who's Maura Bannon?"

"Just a kid—student intern. Friend of Anne-Marie's, in fact. She's doing a semester of work study, little here, little there. She was the one who pushed for the piece—kind of a naive kid,
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thought the shri... psychologist suicide angle was newsworthy. Those of us familiar with the real world were less impressed, but we let her stick it in the computer just to make her happy. Turns out Section One ends up using it as filler—the kid's thrilled. Want me to have her call you?"

"If she has anything to tell me."

"I doubt that she does." Pause. "Doc, the lady in question—did you know her well?"

My lie was reflexive. "Not really. It just came as a shock, seeing the name of someone I knew."

"Must have," said Ned, but his tone had turned wary. "You called Sturgis first, I assume."

"He's out of town."

"Aha. Listen, Doc, I don't want to be insensitive, but if there's something about the lady that would flesh out the story, I'd be open to hearing about it."

"There's nothing, Ned."

"Okay. Sorry for snooping—force of habit."

"That's all right. Talk to you soon, Ned."

At eleven-thirty I took a walk in the dark, trudging up the glen toward Mulholland, listening to crickets and night birds. When I got home an hour later, the phone was ringing.

"Hello."

"Dr. Delaware, this is Yvette at your service. I'm glad I caught you. A call came in for you twenty minutes ago from your wife up in San Luis Obispo. She left a message, wanted to make sure you got it."

Your wife. Slap-on-a-sunbum. They'd been making the same mistake for years. Once upon a time it had been amusing.

"What's the message?"

"She's on the move, will be hard to reach. She'll get in touch with you when she can."

"Did she leave a number?"

"No, she didn't, Dr. Delaware. You sound tired. Been working too hard?"

"Something like that."

"Stay well, Dr. Delaware."

"Same to you."

On the move. Hard to reach. It should have hurt. But I felt relieved, unburdened.

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Since Saturday I'd barely thought about Robin. Had filled my mind with Sharon.

I felt like an adulterer, ashamed but thrilled.

I crawled into bed and hugged myself to sleep. At two forty-five in the morning I woke up, wired and itchy. After throwing on some clothes I staggered down to the carport and started up the Seville. I drove south to Sunset, headed east through Beverly Hills and Boystown, toward the western tip of Hollywood and Nichols Canyon.

At that hour, even the Strip was dead. I kept the windows open, let the sharp chill gnaw at my face. At Fairfax, I turned left, traveled north, and swung onto Hollywood Boulevard.

Mention the boulevard to most people, and, inevitably, one of two images comes to mind: the good old days of Grauman's Chinese, the Walk of the Stars, black-tie premieres, a neon-flooded night scene. Or the street as it is today—slimy and vicious, promising random violence.

But west of that scene, just past La Brea, Hollywood Boulevard shows another face: a single mile of tree-lined residential neighborhood—decently maintained apartment buildings, old, stately churches, and only slightly tarnished two-story homes perched atop well-tended sloping lawns.

Looking down on this smudge of suburbia is a section of the Santa Monica mountain range that meanders through L.A. like a crooked spine. In this part of Hollywood the mountains seem to surge forward threateningly, pushing against the fragile dermis of civilization.

Nichols Canyon begins a couple of blocks east of Fairfax, a lane and a half of winding blacktop feeding off the north side of the boulevard and running parallel to a summer-dry wash. Small, rustic houses sit behind the wash, concealed by tangles of brush, accessible only over homemade footbridges. I passed a Department of Water and Power terminal station lit by high arc lamps that gave off a harsh glare. Just beyond the terminal was flood-control district marshland fenced with chain link, then larger houses on flatter ground, sparsely distributed.

Something wild and swift scurried across the road and dived into the bush. Coyote? In the old days Sharon had talked about seeing them, though I'd never spotted one.

The old days.

What the hell was I expecting to gain by exhuming them? By driving past her house like some moony teenager hoping to catch a glimpse of his beloved?

Stupid. Neurotic.

But I craved something tangible, something to reassure me she'd once been real. That I was real.

I drove on.

Nichols veered to the right. The straightaway turned into Jalmia Drive and compressed to a single lane, darkened even further under a canopy of trees. The road lurched, dipped, finally dead-ended without warning at a bamboo-walled cul-de-sac slotted with several steep driveways.

The one I was looking for was marked by a white mailbox on a stake and a white lattice gate that sagged on its posts.

I pulled to the side, parked, cut the engine, and got out. Cool air. Night sounds. The gate was
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unlocked and flimsy, no more of a barrier than it had been years ago. Lifting it to avoid scraping the cement, I looked around, saw no one. Swung the gate open and passed through. Closing it behind me, I began climbing.

On both sides of the driveway were plantings of fan palm, bird of paradise, yucca, and giant banana. Classic fifties California landscaping. Nothing had changed.

I climbed on, unmolested, surprised at the absence of any kind of police presence. Officially, the L.A.P.D. treated suicides as if they were homicides, and the departmental bureaucracy moved slothfully. This soon after the death, the file would certainly be open, the paperwork barely begun.

There should have been warning posters, a crime-scene cordon, some kind of marker.

Nothing.

Then I heard a burst of ignition and the rumble of a high-performance car engine. Louder. I ducked behind one of the palms and pressed myself into the vegetation.

A white Porsche Carrera appeared from around the top of the drive and rolled slowly down in low gear with its headlights off. The car passed within inches, and I made out the face of the driver: hatchet-shaped, fortyish, with slit eyes and oddly mottled skin. A wide black mustache spread above thin lips, forming a stark contrast with blow-dried snow-white hair and thick white eyebrows.

Not a face easily forgotten.

Cyril Trapp. Captain Cyril Trapp, West L.A. Homicide. Milo's boss, a one-time hard-boozing high-lifer with flexible ethics, now born again into religious sanctimony and gut hatred of anything irregular.

For the past year Trapp had done his best to wear down Milo—a gay cop was as irregular as they come. Closed-minded but not stupid, he went about his persecution with subtlety, avoiding deliberate gay-bashing. Choosing instead to designate Milo a "sex crimes specialist" and assign him to every homosexual murder that came up in West L.A. Exclusively.

It isolated my friend, narrowed his life, and plunged him into a roiling bath of blood and gore: boy hookers, destroyed and destroying. Corpses moldering because the morgue drivers didn't show to pick them up, for fear of catching AIDS.

When Milo complained, Trapp insisted he was simply making use of Milo's specialized knowledge of "the deviant subculture." The second complaint brought him an insubordination report in his file.

Pushing the issue would have meant going up before hearing boards and hiring a lawyer—the Police Benevolent Association wouldn't go to bat on this one. And unremitting media attention that would turn Milo into The Crusading Gay Cop. That was something he wasn't—probably never would be—ready for. So he pushed his oars through the muck, working compulsively and starting to drink again.