Deadline (17 page)

I shook my head. ‘This is a mistake. I
know
Phil Stam. He's scared of his own shadow. He hates going outdoors because he thinks the goddam sun is going to fall on his head. He has fainting spells in supermarkets. He pays people to buy his groceries for him.'

‘Phil Stam does
not
exist, Jerry.'

‘He's a tall young man with a kind of hollow-cheeked look and he wears his hair back in a ponytail and he suffers from agoraphobia. He's basically a very nice guy, a kind of neo-hippie. I know about his childhood in Santa Cruz, I know about his father dying of cancer and his mother's OD, I know all about his divorce from a cocktail waitress called Lydia, and how he gets to see his daughter one weekend in four. I've been prescribing him Nardil for the past three months, Emily … OK, so he gave me a fake name. Maybe.'

‘Maybe he gave you a fake
everything
, Jerry. Maybe he's a damn good actor and he fooled you. This town is full of good actors who can't get legit work.'

I pressed my hands to the sides of my head. I had an ache, and I tried to massage it out of existence. Phil Stam, one of life's victims, a man who found total screaming terror in places like shopping-malls, auditoriums, and beaches, a man in conflict with the space around him – no, I didn't believe he'd been coming to see me four times a month for the last three months under false pretenses. I didn't believe he'd spun out fictional yarns just to fool me, or gain access to my office, or whatever his motive might be.

‘Some people detach themselves from their real names, because that creates a distance between themselves and the psychiatric problems they have. It's a defense mechanism.'

‘You're whistling in the wind, Jerry.'

‘I believe he was telling me the truth about his problems. He just didn't want to give me his name –'

‘You can't stand the idea of being taken in, can you?'

Maybe she was correct. Maybe the idea of an impostor deceiving me was a blow to my self-esteem. I didn't respond. I didn't have the energy to argue with her.

She said, ‘I think if we locate this Phil Stam, we find the missing material. He was scoping out your office all the time he was seeing you.'

I thought of how Phil Stam sometimes undid his ponytail and nervously spun strands of hair around his fingers. And now Emily Ford was telling me he was a counterfeit.

She said, ‘The other patients are on the level, which may be a small consolation to you, Jerry. Now the problem is – how do we locate Phil Stam … or whoever he is? Do you have a photograph of him?'

‘I don't keep photos of my clients,' I said.

‘Pity. I could have circulated it through the LAPD. I still have a few friends there.'

I couldn't handle the fake Phil Stam scenario. It jammed my brainwaves. It sent out messages in a code I couldn't break. ‘I just remembered. Phil cancelled his appointment this morning.'

‘Is that unusual?'

‘It's a first. Also he didn't reschedule. Which is weird, because I had the feeling we were making progress –'

‘I think you've been well and truly conned, dearheart.' And she patted my arm. She might have been saying,
Poor Jerry, there, there
… But she wasn't patronizing me. We'd been through too many things together for that. We'd taken a trip through the strange terrain of her psyche. I'd seen the demons that stalked her world. I believed I knew her as well as one person can know another. Her instinct for self-preservation, the depths of her willpower, the tenacity with which she held to her beliefs – maybe I knew too much. Maybe I liked her more than I wanted to admit to myself, maybe I was drawn to the dark history in her head, fascinated by the energy she'd thrown into creating a self that was partly illusion.

Her hand now lay still, palm down, on my arm. Her expression was suddenly grave. I realized that whatever she'd been holding back had nothing to do with fake patients. And she was about to tell me. I felt a weird tension.

‘By the way, Jerry. Why didn't you mention this? Did it just, uh, slip your mind?' And she took a sheet of paper from the manila folder and handed it to me. I picked it up and read it, read it again, then again, and all the time the typewritten letters were slowly turning to a liquid that ran down the surface of the page like rain-smeared black mascara.

6.55 p.m.

The sheet of paper seemed to wilt in my hand. I shivered because I felt suddenly cold, raw. I saw through the sliding-glass doors the figure of a man move among shrubbery. He was present only a moment, then he was gone.

I looked at Emily and said, ‘A trespasser or a protector?'

She walked to the glass doors, and stood in front of them, as if to obscure my view. ‘That's just Danny. One of my police shields.'

‘Like bodyguards.'

‘On the taxpayer's nickel.' She came back to where I was sitting and flicked the paper in my hand with a fingernail. ‘Sondra didn't tell you about this, did she?'

‘No …'

‘Why not?'

‘I guess maybe she was ashamed. She'd also be worried about bad publicity and how it might affect my practice.'

Emily Ford said, ‘Are there secrets in good marriages?'

‘We've never had any secrets until now,' I said.

‘I guess some stuff gets hidden in every relationship,' she said. ‘Partners keep one another in the dark.'

In the dark
, I thought.
Like the submerged bulk of an iceberg.

Like Emily Ford's own life.

‘Why the hell did you run my wife's name through your computer, anyway?'

‘I ran everyone who has had access to your office, Jerry. I did the same with Jane Steel who, incidentally, has sixteen unpaid parking-tickets. And her gun license is out of date, and her work-permit expired last year –'

‘This is ridiculous, it's petty,' I said.

‘The efficient secretary who overlooks something as important as a work-permit, Jerry? Really?'

‘So Jane has forgotten to fill in a couple of goddam forms, what's the big deal?'

‘This is where we differ, buddy. I believe the big picture's hidden in the tiny details. But you think the details are just too tiresome, don't you? You're a guy that jumps right into the lake without testing the waters.'

Emily Ford's need for order and thoroughness, her desire for exactitude, annoyed me. I glanced through the glass doors. A sparrow rose off the diving-board. I wished Sondra would just materialize in front of me with a surprised smile:
Oh, Jerry, I was thinking about you! What a surprise! Let's have a drink and dinner.
We'd embrace. I'd kiss her. And life, as we'd once known it, would go on. The baby would grow inside her and we'd move to another town. Our new home would have a stained-glass window and a porch and a terrific attic and a couple of acres where we'd grow tomatoes and green beans and oranges and whatever else people cultivated in one
Stop
-sign towns. The rooms would smell of fresh paint and baking cookies, and on Thanksgiving turkey juices would scent the air.

Emily Ford was watching me carefully, as if she expected me to explode like a firework and shower incandescent bits and pieces of myself all across the room.

Cocaine. Goddam coke.

I'd never tried the stuff. I'd been in the presence of it, of course, I'd seen it razor-chopped and carefully laid out on mirrors, and I'd watched people bend over powdery lines with a straw pressed to a nostril. I'd heard the garrulous talk at parties that always followed cocaine, the bright-eyed energy that lasted only so long before people vanished again inside bathrooms to recharge flickering batteries.

‘All right, sure, I knew Sondra had done drugs as a kid,' I heard myself say. ‘She was born and raised in LA, she hung out at the beach, she surfed, she was into all that when she was a teenager, skinny-dipping and healthy, unashamed sex in the sand. She'd smoked pot. Who hasn't? It's no big deal. She told me. She told me everything.'

‘Except this one thing,' Emily Ford said.

I looked at her hard. ‘So she never mentioned doing cocaine. But it's natural she'd come in contact with it. It's the fuel of the business she's in. Musicians and their entourages use it. So Sondra is in this loop, the promo parties, the receptions, and maybe one night when she felt depleted …'

I quit talking. My voice seemed to come, not from myself, but from a stranger. Why hadn't Sondra mentioned this tawdry business to me? We discussed everything, it had always been our way. But this one time she'd failed to do that. She hadn't taken me into her confidence. It prompted the question:
Did she keep other things from me?
I had to let that one go. I had no time for that kind of exploration, that entanglement.

‘Using coke and buying it are two different things,' Emily said. ‘She was busted for making a
buy
, Jerry.'

‘My bet is that she was only doing a favor for Gerson. He owns LaBrea Records. He probably snapped his fingers and told her to find him some blow for one of his musicians. I can imagine it happening that way. He shouts, she jumps. His whole staff jumps. Look, the fact that Sondra was picked up by an undercover cop for buying cocaine doesn't alter this situation. Nothing's changed. She isn't free. I have a few hours to find her and fuck all to go on except a patient who gave me a fake name –
maybe.
So what difference does it make that she bought cocaine from an undercover cop, who then dragged her off to jail?'

Emily said, ‘OK, maybe it doesn't have any relevance to her present situation, but here's the odd part. She walked, Jerry. She was held for an hour and released, and that was the end of it. No bail. No follow-up. No court date. The report I showed you said she and a man named Timothy Dole were collared by an undercover officer called Lawrence Nimble on the night of March 7 at a place called Joolie's on Sunset. And that's where the matter just died. She and this guy Dole were sent home and nobody bothered to slap her wrists with a fine or some nominal community service. She wasn't even photographed or fingerprinted, Jerry. Neither was Dole … Do you know him?'

‘Never heard of him,' I said. ‘Maybe Gerson pulled a string or two.'

She said. ‘Tod Resick was the one pulling strings. You know that name? Resick's a shill for my old pal, Dennis Nardini, one of whose clients I recently subpoenaed. Resick is Nardini's trusted lieutenant and doesn't dare
breathe
unless The Man tells him to suck air.
Nardini
, for Christ's sake. This is no ambulance-chaser, Jerry.'

‘I can't see a guy like Nardini coming into Sondra's orbit,' I said. ‘Unless it was through Gerson. Maybe he's Gerson's lawyer.'

‘Dennis Nardini, Jerry, is one hundred per cent monster. Oh, he comes across as your well-oiled charmer with his Harvard degree, his imported shoes, his handmade suits, but he's still linked to the old ways. The main difference is that he knows some ten-cent words and how to schmooze influential people and he goes to
Giselle
instead of
The Godfather.
He prefers ballet to bullets. When we run into each other, it's smiles and back-slapping. But he knows I'd sling his ass in jail if I could. Intimidation of witnesses. Bribery of judges. Jury tampering. Wholesale corruption. Dennis doesn't care how he gets his clients out of the shit …' She hesitated before she added, ‘I just can't see a guy like Dennis Nardini dealing with this in the middle of the night, Jerry. I can't see him getting out of bed and ordering Resick to spring your wife and her companion for something so banal as a cocaine rap.'

I was quiet for a moment, then I said, ‘I guess it's safe to say Nardini isn't fond of you.'

‘An unassailable truth.'

‘He represents people who'd prefer you didn't go to Washington. His associates. His clients. People who have sleepless nights when they think of you sitting up there in the hot-seat in DC. People who don't want Emily Ford trawling through crimes and issuing subpoenas like they were inflated currency in a Third World republic. People who are very happy with the
status quo.
'

‘Hold it there, Jerry. If you're suggesting Nardini's a factor behind your wife's abduction, I'd have to draw a line. If he
is
behind it – and that's
truly
slim, Jerry – he's so far removed from the action you couldn't trace it back to him in a hundred years. You'd never get through the chain of command, who ordered who to do what, et cetera. I think we've got a better chance of trying to track down the guy who passed himself off as Stam than we have of dumping Sondra's disappearance anywhere near Nardini's doorstep. Believe me.'

‘Did Resick pressure the arresting officer … what's his name?'

‘Larry Nimble.'

‘What did Resick say to him?'

‘Jerry, let's leave Nardini and his patsy out of the picture. Concentrate on the phony patient. Stam.'

‘Have you talked to Nimble?'

‘Dear Christ. You're dogged. I tried to reach him. Apparently he's on leave of absence. He's ill. Ulcers or something. Satisfied?'

No, I wasn't satisfied. I couldn't imagine Sondra in a holding-cell. I couldn't imagine Nimble or any cop handcuffing her. And who the hell was Timothy Dole? Maybe he was another lackey at the record company, and he'd gone with Sondra to make the coke buy. And now Dennis Nardini had come into the frame, and suddenly the picture had altered, but I wasn't sure how.

I said, ‘What if Nardini owed Gerson some big-time favor, and that's why he sent his gopher to deal with the coke situation? Maybe Gerson's a major client.'

‘It's possible,' was all Emily said, but in such a way I knew her mind was elsewhere. She had the look of a novice highwire artiste, withdrawn in concentration, alive to the fear of slipping.