Twice Dying (9 page)

“Was the car locked?”

“I guess I forgot.”

“Very sloppy, Alison.”

“I looked up the bird in a book,” she said. “It’s a Western Tanager. Caymas conies from a sort of Ma Barker clan up in the Mendocino woods. The mother’s an old hippie, Haven Schulte. Three fathers for five kids. She gave them all nature names: Aspen, Mica, Dolphin. There’s a boy about seventeen named Tanager.”

Monks said, “Whoa. Slow down.”

“It’s an invitation,” she said. “I’m supposed to go talk to Tanager.”

“To Mendocino? Up in the backwoods? For Christ’s sake. It’s an invitation into an ambush.”

“If somebody wanted to hurt me, why would they warn me? They could just take me out.”

“Not quite as conveniently. Caymas is the one who raped and strangled the little boy?”

“Yes.”

“Caught a searcher in a snare, hung him upside down, and almost beat him to death with a baseball bat? That guy?”

“Look, he scared the shit out of me, I admit it,” she said. “Very quiet on the surface. Underneath—something else.”

“He could be up there waiting for you, Alison. This could all be set up by Jephson.”

“And it could be someone else at Clevinger who knows what’s going on, but is scared to come forward. Knows Tanager can tell me something that would blow this open.”

Monks drained his glass and walked to the refrigerator for more ice, tucking the phone between shoulder and ear.

“You’d be very foolish to go alone.”

He could almost see her smile.

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

Inside Monks’s bedroom closet was a safe, bolted to the floor, where he kept his guns and a few valuables. He took out a 7-millimeter Beretta automatic and then, after a hesitation, an envelope of photographs. He set them on the dining room table along with weapon cleaning supplies: rods, swabs, oil. He had not fired the pistol in years, and never at a live target. Carrying it concealed was strictly illegal, but the law could be reasoned with.

He poured one more drink, put the bottle away, and cleaned the Beretta. When he was done, he washed his hands and opened the envelope of photos.

Alison had told him of their existence shortly after they had started seeing each other.

“I met this guy at a party. Before you,” she added quickly. “A photographer. He begged me to pose. I thought, why not? He’s a professional, right?”

“What kind of photos?” Monks said, already guessing.

“They started off straight, just sexy. Then went on from there.”

“Went on how far?”

She shrugged. “We did a bunch of coke. I got worked up. There must have been a hidden camera.”

Monks exhaled. “I’m sure it happens all the time.”

“He sent me one. I can buy the rest. Would you come with me? I don’t think he’d pull anything. I’d just feel—exposed all over again.”

The photographer’s name was Gary Benniger. He lived on a houseboat in Sausalito. He was in his early thirties, handsome, with perfect teeth, curled hair that appeared to have been tinted blond, and a shirt open halfway down his tanned chest. He was unctuously polite, maintaining the charade that these were photos Alison had commissioned. Monks watched silently while she exchanged two thousand dollars cash for the packet.

Monks said, “How do we know there are no copies?”

Benniger smiled, the smile of a man who had decided he no longer needed to pretend. “You her uncle?”

Monks took a photograph of his own from his coat pocket and tossed it on the floor at Benniger’s feet. It was a black-and-white that had been taken by a navy journalist during the fighting
around Quangtri. It showed Monks, years younger but clearly recognizable, on a hospital ship in the South China Sea, wearing bloody scrubs, staring haggardly at the next helicopter load of torn men on stretchers being rushed into surgery.

“Careful out there,” Monks said. “Things can get rough.”

On the way to the car, Alison said, “Still want to hang around with a bitch this dumb?”

“Somebody’s going to have to keep you out of trouble.”

She handed the packet of photos to him. They were color, glossy, professional quality. The first several showed her posed in, then removing, filmy bra and thong panties, leaving on white thigh-high stockings and a gold necklace. The next in the series was obviously taken from farther away and was less artfully staged. She was kneeling, caressing the erection of the man she faced. There were a dozen more, apparently taken at timed intervals of a minute or two.

“Look them over,” she said, “and tell me where you want to start.”

Monks went to the refrigerator and took out the evening’s centerpiece, a thick filet mignon. The cats closed in like sharks, using his absence that day as leverage for tyranny. He distributed succulent bits of raw steak until the swirl of fur around
his ankles turned to the more pressing business of paw-washing and naps, then put what was left on the hibachi.

He ate standing up in front of the wood stove: the filet charred just right, al dente linguine tossed with garlic and Parmesan, half an avocado soaked in vinegary blue-cheese dressing. The meal brought on fatigue from tension and lack of sleep. He imagined he could feel his blood pouring to his stomach to aid digestion, leaving his body like a deflated balloon. By the time he finished washing the dishes, he was in a half-dream. He walked down the hall to his bedroom. He put the photos back in the safe, but left the Beretta on his dresser, and fell into bed.

That time of the photographs incident had been a bad one in most other ways. His career was damaged, his marriage over. He was drinking far too much and not caring about what was left, with a harsh destructive anger turned inward.

One night several weeks later, Alison had whispered: “I want you to choke me a little. Not too hard. Not enough to bruise.”

He knew that professionally, she specialized in violence. She was working on the psychiatric ward at Letterman, San Francisco’s major VA hospital, and sometimes went into San Quentin to teach anger management groups. But this was the first time he had seen it spill over into personal life.

It made Monks uneasy and he resisted at first,
but then he pleased her. What he had not imagined was the intensity it would bring to him, too. As the nights passed, the limits stretched, and Monks began to realize that he was caught in an obsession.

There were no promises of fidelity between them. As more weeks passed, another phase began, whether deliberate or careless on her part, he could not tell: hints of other affairs, half-overheard phone calls, unexplained absences. Every week or two, he would come out to the Bronco to find a gift on the seat, leaving him to guess whether it was tease, or apology, or reward.

One late afternoon he finished a shift at Mercy Hospital and came out to find a black silk scarf embroidered with gold. He stopped by her house on his way home. She was not there. Monks started drinking. Over the next hours he reached a strange disconnected clarity, his reflexes as sharp as a surgeon’s, or so it seemed.

When her headlights lit the window, he waited inside the front door, and when she came in, he pinned her against it and slipped the scarf around her throat. She shuddered, sinking beneath his weight to the floor.

And Lord, something thickened around them like a black whirlpool, turning into an entity that had a life of its own, terrifying and ravenous. Its force filled him like talons operating a puppet, like electricity surging through a man helpless to let go of a live wire. His hands tightened, while
her own sounds and clutching fingers seemed not to fight but to urge him on.

She was almost quiet when he tore himself free and stumbled away like a felon into the night.

From there Monks had started to turn back the way he had come, to relative respectability, sobriety, a stable life. A new force had arisen to drive him, more powerful than any yet: fear.

But not of what had happened, or even of what he now knew he was capable of. He was afraid because that had been the most intimate moment of his life.

The cats were prowling now in the dark, shadows moving continually at the edges of his vision, as if there were dozens instead of just three. Soon they would join him, miffed that he had been gone, but too glad he was back to miss the chance. Tonight, with luck and the blessed combination of exhaustion and alcohol, he would not wake and toss.

Monks, a name traceable back to the ninth century in Ireland’s northwest, from the Gaelic
manachan:
a monk, a solitary, one who lived alone.

A
few minutes before 10
A.M.
the next day, Monks walked down Montgomery Street in the San Francisco financial district, a sunless corridor with austere old edifices that stood like a row of cathedrals to wealth. He turned into a granite-faced structure with a brass plaque that read
THE CHILDERS BUILDING
.

The lobby was high-ceilinged, discreetly elegant, hung with tapestries and portraits of substantial men. A security guard greeted Monks with measured deference, suggesting that while he might be presentable, he was no one of consequence. Monks stepped off the elevator at the seventh floor, then walked along a burgundy-carpeted, walnut-wainscotted hallway, past heavy doors embossed with gold-leaf business
escutcheons, to the offices of ASCLEP. He was greeted by a secretary whose acquaintance he had never made further than the name Kristin. She was young, pretty, fashion conscious, and her smile always seemed to pity him for any number of things, beginning with his age.

Dennis O’Dwyer was standing just inside the door of the conference room, as if he had been waiting.

“I dug up a tasty little bit on your man Jephson,” he said quietly. “Stick around after.”

Monks nodded and took his seat at the long oval table, beside Dennis, Stover Larrabee, and ASCLEP’S attorney, Clarisse Kressler.

At the other end of the table, a kidney specialist named Jerome DeMers and his attorney faced them like an opposing tag team.

ASCLEP, named for the god of healing, was a doctor-owned malpractice insurance company. In the 1970s, the deep-pockets game had started running wild: attorneys cast lawsuits like fishing nets and juries awarded fantastic settlements in personal injury cases, irrespective of anything resembling common sense. Malpractice insurance rates climbed sharply even for physicians with pristine records and were on their way to becoming astronomical. Most companies simply passed the increased cost on, but for ASCLEP, this would be passing it on to themselves.

Thus, what was known as the ASCLEP Performance Evaluation Board came into being: a
group of medical professionals, attorneys, and insurance executives who forestalled as much trouble as they could before it ran them into the ground. When an insuree was sued for malpractice, the board reviewed the case and made a recommendation as to whether ASCLEP should go to court or settle. Unlike most companies, ASCLEP would fight if they were convinced their physician was in the right, even at greatly increased expense.

Less frequently came situations where there was reason to believe an insuree was a risk. If this was confirmed, his insurance was dropped. This was much disliked by defense attorneys and was frequently challenged, along with the board’s murky status in general. It was not the sort of peer review conducted by state and county medical societies. It did not officially determine whether malpractice had occurred, did not exonerate or censure. It was not a legal organization and made no recommendations to any enforcing body. Its proceedings were absolutely private, except in the rare instances when a defending physician’s anger overcame his common sense.

Today, Monks thought, might just be one of those days.

Dr. DeMers was a big man, handsome, dressed in a well-tailored navy blazer and pleated charcoal slacks, with a red-striped silk tie just loose at the neck. His black hair glistened with mousse. DeMers, Larrabee had discovered, liked the
good life, including gambling cruises on Lake Tahoe.

Clarisse moved to the room’s central area, which served as a sort of demilitarized zone. She was a sultry dark blond in her late thirties, a trifle broad-beamed, but attractive. She was known as Clarisse the Piece, a name, or title, Monks had once heard her referred to, in her presence, at a company-sponsored dinner. He had frozen in the expectation of fury, but she had not seemed to mind at all—on the contrary.

Clarisse repeated the alarum that began each meeting like the company’s private Miranda Rights reading.

“Gentlemen, let me impress upon you the need for confidentiality. It’s very much in everyone’s interest. Any breach might make proceedings vulnerable to outside scrutiny and cause litigation against both parties.

“It’s ASCLEP’s concern that Dr. DeMers has acted in violation of ethics, good judgment, and law. Specifically, we have reason to believe that he falsified data for Mrs. William Edgery in order to move her onto a priority list for a kidney transplant.”

DeMers’s attorney, one Corbin Rydell, leaned forward with his forearms on the table. A briefcase rested beside him like a nuclear weapon. Over the years, Monks had become something of a connoisseur of defense approaches, ranging from a cozy,
We’re-all-in-this-together routine, to the blazing outrage of You’re-going-to-regret-the-day-you-were-ever-born. This one he quickly identified as the always fashionable, restrained but menacing, Gentlemen-you-are-wasting-my-valuable-time riff. It was unfortunately undercut by plump cheeks and an upturned nose, giving Rydell a somewhat porcine look.

Rydell said, “I’ll start by pointing out that this board has no legal jurisdiction.”

“We’ll all aware ofthat, Mr. Rydell,” Clarisse said. “This is an informal proceeding. To which your client agreed.”

“And that a specialist being evaluated by an emergency physician is preposterous.”

“Dr. Monks acts as chair, not as judge. Although I’ll point out that he’s nationally board-certified in internal medicine as well as emergency medicine.”

Monks held his hand up for silence.

“We have statements from several specialists, Mr. Rydell. The chief surgeon who performed the transplant on Mrs. Edgery, for openers.” He took a sheaf of papers from his daypack, and several more silent presences entered the fray: more potential salvoes in the battle to sink this little ship.