“Janis drive? Fuck that. I can drive, and I’m meeting Marvos—dammit—Mavranos with you, too. We’ll get this done. I don’t want to have that little kid’s dad’s blood on my hands one hour more than I have to.” Her own blood was running down her wrist. “He just wants, my father, he wants to become king, like he failed to do when he was in a body of his own. A male body, he needs. If we can get Crane solidly raised from the dead. I think my father will have no reason to hang around, he’ll just go back into hibernation, like a case of herpes in remission. You don’t have herpes, do you?”
Cochran blinked at her. “No.”
“Tiffany does. You should know. I won’t even drink out of a glass she’s used. How far away is it, where you’re meeting Marvy-Arvy?”
“Oh—no more than twenty minutes, if we drive. Of course if we’ve got to find a place to park the car, I don’t know how long that might take. No, I really think it’s too dangerous for you to be there, Cody—if Mavranos gets hold of you, he’s liable to do something like—”
“Nothing I’ll object to. Nothing I won’t deserve. I got his friend killed.” She struggled up from the bed, still pressing the bloody face-cloth to her nose. “You got coffee? Good. Make me a cup, and pour the rest of that bourbon into it. I’m gonna,” she said with a sigh, as if facing a painful ordeal, “take a shower.”
“Could I talk to Janis about all this?”
“No. And what do you mean, ‘she doesn’t have a nosebleed’? It’s her nose too, isn’t it?”
Cochran opened his mouth to point out some inconsistencies in the things she’d said, but found that he was laughing too hard to speak; tears were leaking from the corners of his eyes, and his chest hurt. “I’ll,” he managed to choke, “have the coffee ready when you…get out of the shower.”
Her mouth twitched. “Laugh it up, funny boy,” she said sourly, then lurched into the bathroom and closed the door with a slam. From the other side of the door he heard her call “And don’t be peeking in here to see if Tiffany’s on’“
Cochran was still sniffling when he pulled open the bedside table drawer, and he lifted out the cassette and stared at it.
Two full seconds over a lit match would destroy the thing.
But, It’s her nose too, isnt it?—and, if it comes to that, his, too. Her terrible father’s. A lot of jumping around, reshuffling and discarding, might happen before we all get out of San Francisco.
He tucked the cassette carefully into his shirt pocket.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Besides that all secret men are men soon terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to justify the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
DR. Armentrout knew he was lucky to have got out of the smoky apartment building and back down to the street, and his car, and to Long John Beach, before encountering this…very shifty woman.
The day had started propitiously, but this last half hour had been a rout.
LATE LAST Thursday his teal-blue BMW had finally limped off the 280 at Junipero Serra Boulevard and sputtered up Seventh to Parnassus to the UCSF Medical Center, where he had got a couple of colleagues to make some telephone calls for him; the upshot was that he had been allowed to take over house-sitting duties at the nearby Twin Peaks villa of a neurologist who was on sabbatical in Europe.
The first thing he had done at the empty house was to change the phone-answering message. Then, very quickly, he had made a photocopied blank sheet of letterhead from the nearby Pacifica minimum-security psychiatric facility, and he’d altered the phone and fax numbers on it to those of the absent neurologist’s house; he had addressed the sheet to Rosecrans Medical, and typed on it a transfer for Long John Beach, along with a request for Beach’s records—to make it look plausible he had had to ask for everything: nursing progress reports, psychosocial assessment, treatment plan, financial data, the legal section. He hoped the neurologist was in the habit of keeping a lot of paper in his home fax printer. Long John Beach was 53-58, on a full conservatorship, but the old man’s “conservator” had been a fictitious entity from the start, so there’d been no risk in signing the remembered made-up name.
Then Armentrout had telephoned Rosecrans Medical and peremptorily announced his application for immediate administrative leave. He’d explained that he was temporarily working as a consultant at UCSF Medical, and pointed out that he was entitled to six weeks a year of vacation, and had never taken any of it. He had named one of the other doctors, an elderly Freudian, to serve as acting chief of staff in his absence. Nobody had argued with him, as he had known they would not—a chief of psychiatry could pretty well do as he liked in a clinic.
To his surprise, he had felt bad about violating their trust, breaking the rules—and not just because he would lose his career and probably be charged with a felony if he were to be caught. He had pursued a psychiatric career largely out of gratitude for his own long-ago deliverance from guilt and shame, and he regretted the necessity of this dishonesty far more than he had ever regretted the killing of a patient.
While waiting vainly to hear from Plumtree’s Omar Salvoy personality on the cellular telephone, Armentrout had printed up a flyer and posted it in various bars and surf shops and parks around the city; REWARD FOR INFORMATION, the flyer had read, followed by a picture of Koot Hoomie Parganas—an old school photo, the same one that had been on billboards in Los Angeles when the boy had dropped out of sight in ’92—and one of Angelica Anthem Elizalde, also from that year, blown up from a newspaper photo, and unfortunately showing her with her mouth open in surprise and her eyes closed. He had printed the absent neurologist’s phone number at the bottom, and let the answering machine take all calls to it.
There would have been no point in listing the number of his cellular phone—it rang all day long now, with apparently every idiot ghost in the country wanting to threaten him or weep at him or beg him for money or rides to Mexico. He had to answer it every tune, though, because it was the line Salvoy would call in on; and at times during this last couple of days, tired of Long John Beach’s insane rambiings, Armentrout had even stayed on the line and had disjointed conversations with the moronic “ghostings,” as the old writers had referred to the things. They certainly were more gerund than noun.
THE WOMAN he was facing now, though, seemed to deserve a noun.
THIS MORNING a call had come in on the neurologist’s line, and Armentrout had picked it up after hearing a few sentences. It was an old man calling from a pay phone at the Moscone Convention Center, and he was excitedly demanding the reward money. Armentrout had driven over there and paid him fifty dollars, and the man had then told him that the woman and boy on the flyer, and two other men, were living in an upstairs apartment on Lapu Lapu, a block away.