The Syndrome (18 page)

Eddie Bonilla’s predatory grin floated before him, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile. What was the phrase he’d used?
Magna cum bullshit.

How could he remember things—words—and not remember his mother’s voice? If asked, he could recite chapter and verse of her life: where she was born, the time she got
lost in the woods, how she’d fallen from a horse at seventeen and broken her collarbone—which kept her from the senior prom. But the truth was he didn’t remember his mother as a mother. She was part of his “database”—along with James Dean, the Baltimore harbor, and long division.

Going over to his desk, he looked up the number for the D.C. Office of Vital Records and punched it out on the telephone keypad. Then he listened through a long and well-organized voice-mail menu outlining procedures for obtaining birth and death certificates. The voice noted that disclosure of these documents was limited under privacy statutes. Birth certificates did not become publicly available for one-hundred years. Death certificates did not become releasable until fifty years had passed. The only exceptions to these rules were the individuals whose records they were, and next of kin.

And, if the recording was to be believed, these people would have to provide a valid photo ID before anything would be released to them. Which proved Bonilla’s documents were forgeries. Except … he
was
a detective. And from what Duran had seen on television, and read in books, private eyes seemed to make their living through “contacts” and pretexts. That a P.I. should finesse a death certificate out of the Office of Vital Records was not beyond the realm of possibility.

On the other hand
, Duran thought,
you’d think I’d know who I am—and whether I’m dead or not.
The predicament would have been amusing, if it weren’t for the fact that his client had committed suicide, and now he was being sued for millions.

But there was something else, something that Bonilla had said. It took a moment—then Duran remembered: the Social Security Death Index. The detective had gone to the Office of Vital Records after accessing the Social Security Internet site.

And maybe that explains things
, Duran thought.
Maybe the private eye found someone with a similar name—or even the same name—and confused it with me and mine.

Sitting down at the computer, Duran logged onto AOL and searched for the site that lists the names of Social Security recipients who have died. It only took a moment, and then he found it. The page was a link on half a dozen URLs devoted to genealogy. He tried
Ancestry.com
, and was soon connected.

There were three fields of entry in the search engine: first name, last name, and state. Duran typed his names in the appropriate fields, and clicked on the District of Columbia. A few seconds later, the results materialized on the monitor. There was a single entry:

It was him.

He almost fainted.

The cabdriver had no idea how to get to Rock Creek Cemetery, even though both of them could see it on the hillside as they cruised along the parkway, gravestones, statues, and vaults stepping down the hill. They tried three exits: Calvert, Cathedral, and Massachusetts Avenue, but as soon as they left the parkway, the cemetery disappeared.

“I’m gon’ try P Street,” the driver said, heading downtown again. “You got kin buried here?”

Duran nodded. “Yeah.”

“Not my
biz-ness
,” the cabbie said, scolding himself. “Myself—I lost my mother eight years ago, and I ain’t seen her stone for quite a while.” He shook his head, and made a clucking sound as he leaned forward. Then he turned on the windshield wipers.

Eight years ago …
, Duran thought. That was about when his own parents had died—in the summer of ’93, when he’d been in grad school.

The driver swung onto the P Street exit ramp, but, once
again, there was no sign of the cemetery. Soon, they were back on the parkway.

“Have to be here someplace,” the driver said, “you can see it, from time to time.” Finally, he pulled into the tiny Exxon station that stood on the corner near the Watergate Hotel. Leaving the car, he went up to the jumpsuited attendant, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Mah man …,” he said.

The two of them disappeared into the gas station’s office. After a while, the driver emerged with a Post-it in his hand. Sliding behind the wheel, he clapped the yellow slip of paper to the dashboard, and declared, “Now we in bizness.”

And so they were. The cemetery’s entrance was barely a mile away, though by the time they pulled up to the little building that served as its office, the rain was falling steadily.

“Say, man,” the driver asked as Duran paid him. “You want an umbrella?”

“Sorry?”

“No charge or nothin’. Every rainy day, two or three people leave they umbrella in the cab. So what I do, I try to
redistribute
things, know what I mean?”

Duran was so taken aback by the man’s spontaneous kindness that he felt a jolt of sadness when the taxi drove away, as if he were bidding farewell to a friend.

The shuffling cemetery attendant looked, to Duran’s eye, close to joining the ranks that he himself oversaw. His skin was papery white, his eyes red-rimmed and crusty. He was dressed in work clothes—a dark blue shirt, matching pants, and boots.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’m looking for a grave.”

“Well, you came to the right place. What’s the name?”

“Duran,” he replied, sounding foolish to himself. “Jeffrey Duran.” At the man’s request, he spelled it.

The man listlessly punched the information onto a computer keyboard. After a moment, he withdrew a printed map
of the cemetery from a shelf, circled an area marked P-3, and handed the sheet to Duran without a word.

The umbrella was nice and big, with a bulbous wooden handle. When he stepped outside and opened it, the rain came down harder, as if on signal, peppering the fabric as he checked the landmarks on the map. He didn’t mind that it was raining—if anything, the diminished visibility softened the agoraphobia that was stirring in his gut.

Standing within the umbrella’s drip line, studying the map, he could see that finding the grave was not going to be easy. And it wasn’t. Even with the map, it took him nearly twenty minutes. And despite the umbrella, his shoes and socks and pant legs were soaked when he finally found it.

Jeffrey Aaron Duran’s gravestone sat on a small knoll under a towering Norway spruce. The ground around it was spongy with rain and covered with russet-colored needles that smelled like Christmas. Duran stared:

The sight of the gravestone was like a body blow. It took his breath away and, for a moment, he was afraid to look around, afraid there would be emptiness on either side of him—that if he looked, he’d find himself stranded in a void with nothing to hang onto but the certainty that the world as he knew it was a mere hallucination, an artifact of his own disordered mind. Destabilized to the core, Duran was helpless as a gust of wind grabbed at the umbrella in his hand, and snatched it away. Reflexively, he turned and watched as the umbrella cartwheeled down the hill, grateful that there
was
a hill, an umbrella, a cemetery.

By then, he was beyond surprise, or thought he was, until he realized what ought to have been obvious in the first
place—that he was standing in a family plot, surrounded by the graves of several Durans. For the second time in a minute, the world lurched as his eyes fell upon a granite plinth from which an angel rose, wings folded, eyes downcast. Beneath the angel, the names of his parents were etched in the stone—and like him, they’d died in 1970.

The words on the death certificate ran through his mind:
Massive trauma (auto).
Not carbon monoxide, then. And not Nantucket, but
Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Turning, he walked slowly through the rain until he arrived, drenched, at the cemetery office, where he asked the attendant if he’d call him a cab.

The man looked up from his desk in a slow, reptilian way and, seeing the look on Duran’s face, broke into a toxic grin, ripe with schadenfreude. “What’s a matter? Seen a ghost?”

It was so unfair.

For the past week, Adrienne had been at the office every night until midnight, preparing for depositions. And just this once, she’d come in late—and Curtis Slough’s secretary was all over her voice mail with progressively sarcastic messages. Culminating in: “Uhhh—are you coming in at
all
today?”

Bitch!

Adrienne glanced at her watch. It was ten in the morning—not two in the afternoon. Taking a deep breath, she counted to five, and pushed the button for Slough’s extension. The receptionist said that the line was busy, and put her on hold.

While she waited, she looked through the file on Dante Esposito, one of the city’s asphalt “experts.” From what she could see, it looked as if Esposito was going to testify that the asphalt in question was probably
different
from the mix they usually used. (Not good.)

When Slough finally came on the line, it was obvious from his cheerful tone that he’d forgotten why (or even
that)
he wanted to talk to her. Which put the ball in Adrienne’s court, because Slough had a reputation for blaming people for his own shortcomings.

“I got your messages,” she told him, “and I have the documents you wanted. Should I send them up?”

“I guess so. Anything useful?”

She hesitated. “Well … I found various inspectors’ reports—and they’re fine for us. As far as the inspectors are concerned, everything about the job was A-OK.”

Slough grunted his approval, then qualified it. “Well, that’s great,” he said, “but we still have Esposito—”

“Yes, but the final inspection was conducted by a man named McEligot. He’s retired now, but he’s the one who
hired
Esposito in the first place. I talked to him last night, and according to McEligot, the mix was fine. So—”

“Excellent!”

“And since Esposito didn’t even
look
at the asphalt until two years after it was laid down—”

“I like it!” Slough boomed. “Makes Esposito look like he’s shooting from the hip. Outstanding! We’ll kill the bastards.”

Eddie Bonilla picked her up for lunch at 12:30. He said he had a “bright idea” that he wanted to discuss with her—and, not only that, he’d buy her lunch.

He was waiting for her in his car, in the courtyard outside Harbor Place, where Slough, Hawley was headquartered. The car was a battered Camaro with a pair of Rubik’s Cubes hanging from the rearview mirror, and vanity plates that read
SNUPER.
Adrienne climbed in. Eddie gunned the engine and shot out into traffic.

She sat back, and closed her eyes. On the whole, she
liked
being a passenger. It reminded her of the car trips that she took as a kid. She and Nikki. Who used to breathe on the glass so that she could draw on it and they could play tic-tac-toe. It made her think of all those long vacation rides to Lake Sherando, where they went five years in a row, camping out. Deck and Marlena up front, she and Nikki (and all the stuff that wouldn’t fit in the trunk) jammed into the back—along with Cupcake, the cat, in her cat carrier.

As they passed the Washington Monument, Adrienne recalled the time Nikki fed Cupcake the remains of her Fishwich—which had been sitting in the sun for hours. The cat got sick, and God how it smelled! They’d pinched their nostrils together, and made noises like
ewwwwww!
and rolled down the windows, and stuck their heads out, pretending to gag. There were a lot of trips like that, and they were always the same: long and boring—and lots of fun. Sometimes, they sang songs, or played word games like the one that went:
I packed my bag and in it I put …

“A gun.”

“What?” Bonilla was frowning at her.

She looked around. They were passing the Library of Congress, heading east on Pennsylvania. She hadn’t realized she’d been thinking aloud. “My sister had a gun,” she said. “A rifle.”

Bonilla shrugged. “Lotsa people do. Got one myself. Got a couple, in fact.”

Adrienne wasn’t surprised. Bonilla struck her as the kind of person who’d have an arsenal. Which made her think that maybe she should show him her sister’s gun. Ask him about the silencer—and what she should do with it. She was pretty sure it was illegal to have one. But what she asked instead was: “Where are we going?”

“Mangialardo’s. Great subs.”

At 9th and Pennsylvania, they got stuck behind a delivery van and didn’t make the light. Bonilla let out a string of curses, drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel, then
gunned the engine a couple of times, just out of habit. She looked out the window. They were driving past a kind of demilitarized zone, a down-at-the-heels buffer between black and yuppie ghettos, when she remembered to ask him about “the assets search.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot to tell you.” He tilted his head from side to side, not quite shaking it. “There’s a guy in Florida—‘information broker’ You give him a name or a Social, he’ll run it through every bank, brokerage, and insurance company in the country.”

“Sounds illegal.”

Bonilla shrugged. “Not for me—’cause I don’t know how he does it. None of my business. But the point is: he runs your sister—everywhere—and what he comes up with is … the same accounts you gave me.”

“The ones at Riggs—”

Bonilla nodded. “Checking and savings. Maybe twenty grand, tops, just like you said.”

“So he struck out.”

“I don’t think so. I think the guy found whatever there was to find. I think that’s it.”