She rose and patted herself dry with deliciously soft towels, like the robe, kept electrically warm. She studied herself at her full-length mirror. Most of the flaws – the tiny crow's-feet developing at the corners of her eyes, the slight slackness in her jaw-line, the softening of flesh where no amount of exercise would tighten it – could be artfully concealed. Her skin was supple with the oil. But it was not what it once had been. It was losing elasticity, that smooth tautness over the muscles. There was even evidence of checking, and traces of cellulite on her buttocks and thighs.
In spite of all the exercising, the vitamins, the skin care, she was losing ground at the age of forty-one. There was no longer any denying it.
The days when men with cameras had adored her, when the phone never stopped ringing and all the good things in the world were hers to pick and choose, were long gone. She had stretched them by going to work for D' Anton – becoming the prime example of his art, a living sculpture that women envied and men were still awed by. But she had nearly lost that, too. She shivered, and dressed quickly in jeans and a sweater.
Then she stepped to the vanity and picked up the vase of roses that no admirer had sent, and threw it, with a hnnhh of exploding breath, against the mirror. The vase shattered and the mirror cracked in all directions, like a giant spiderweb with spreading fingers.
Chapter 28
Coffee Trenette is alone when you find her, curled up on a couch in a darkened side room, watching the poolside party through the windows. She's high from smoking junk.
You knew where she'd be. You've been watching her tonight, getting all this together in your head.
Monks was here, searching for you. And Coffee was talking to him.
She doesn't say a word as you walk up – just watches you. She's the queen of cool, with a way of looking at you that puts you right down under her shoes. Like the others, she thinks she knows what you are.
You kneel on the floor beside her, like you're nervous about approaching her.
"What you want?" she says, but her tone isn't too tough. She senses that you're here to offer something.
You keep your voice very quiet. "Here it is, straight. I've got a bottle of pharmaceutical Demerol. Hundred-milligram, the strong stuff."
She stays cool, watching you with that heavy-lidded look. But she's already made up her mind. Smoke is fine, but the needle is the real thing, and there are twenty or thirty shots in a bottle.
"You going to just give it to me?" she says.
You smile timidly. "I've always had a thing for you."
Her lips twist, just a little. She nods and rises unsteadily.
"It's out in my car," you say. "Come on."
You lead her out the back way, to where you've parked, in the shadows. She stands beside the car, rubbing her upper arms like she's cold. You reach across and pop open the passenger door.
She hesitates a moment longer, then slides in beside you.
Chapter 29
In the hours between midnight and dawn, the world was still and without distractions, even of daylight itself. D' Anton sat in the darkened waiting room of his clinic, surrounded by the images of his women. It was something he did frequently. It soothed him – softened the hard sharp edge he lived on. His mind was usually a clear pool at these times, and his thinking was pure and undisturbed. He had trained himself since childhood not to need more than four or five hours of sleep per night. He had used this predawn time to form himself into a master surgeon – first, for study, then for practice, and ultimately, to envision the creations he would render. To see the potential beauty of a woman, and then to be able to render it – to wield the scalpel as it delicately parted the skin, to reshape precisely her living flesh, to take her down to the bone and bring her back transformed – this was a power to which nothing else compared.
But there was no soothing in it tonight. He had made an appearance at the party, put on a good face. He did not want the world to know what Eden's loss meant to him.
Even worse than that – the grotesque fear that he had managed to bury deep in his mind was coming to the surface.
And he was not alone. Monks had spoken the name, Roberta Massey. How in the hell had he found out about her!
A glow appeared on the room's far wall. It brightened, swung in an arc, then disappeared. He realized that it came from headlights shining through the curtains – a vehicle pulling into the clinic's parking lot. D'Anton looked at his watch. It was 12:43. No one had any business here. He got to his feet and went to a window.
Gwen Bricknell was hurrying up the clinic's steps.
D'Anton strode to the door and jerked it open, anger overcoming his surprise.
"What has gotten into you?" he snapped. "First you invite Monks to our house. Then you show up here, in the middle of the night."
"I'm trying to save you, darling," she said, stalking haughtily past him.
"Save me? What are you talking about?"
"From death row," she said kindly.
'Death row! Gwen, what is this – mad cow disease?" But he felt the unseen blow to his gut, close to where that fear lived.
"You want to play games, Welles?" she said. "All right. Let me tell you a story."
She sat on the desk, crosslegged, hands folded in her lap. It was a little girl's pose – but she was at the station where she controlled the clinic. D'Anton stood before her, powerless, like a patient.
"Once upon a time, there was a beautiful model, who made a plastic surgeon famous," she said. Her tone was childish, too, an eerie high-pitched whisper. "Let's call her Gwen. She spent her career as a living advertisement for him, and then went to work for him. Right here at this desk." She slapped her hand down on it.
"Then one day she noticed that he was doing thousands of dollars' worth of free surgery on some little slut. Let's call her Eden. It didn't take Gwen long to figure out what was going on. Gwen knew the surgeon had affairs. He'd had one with Gwen, when she was young. She could forgive all that. But this was different. The surgeon was making Eden into his new advertisement. Then he was going to throw Gwen away, like an old rug."
"Oh, no," D' Anton said softly, enlisting that confident voice that women found hypnotic. "Dear, dear Gwen, you misunderstand completely."
She ignored him.
"Gwen started listening to the surgeon when he was on the phone, and one day she heard him tell Eden he'd meet her that night," she said. "But he didn't say where. Gwen drove to all the places she thought they might go, and finally, it must have been one o'clock in the morning by then, she came here.
"There weren't any cars, but there was a light on inside that shouldn't have been. She thought maybe the surgeon had parked in the loading dock, so no one would know he was here. So she let herself in the back door and looked. Sure enough, the surgeon's car was there, and she could hear somebody, farther in."
D'Anton stared at her silently, with his dread rising to the point of nausea.
"Gwen was just about to go in there and let the surgeon and his girlfriend have it," she whispered. "Then she saw that the car's trunk was open, and there was a big plastic garbage bag in it. Now, the surgeon would never have carried something like that in his beautiful car. What in the world was going on?"
Her eyes were wide, with a child's playacting earnestness. But the fear in them was real.
"She walked over to the bag and touched it. Something inside was soft and warm. Her hand knew what it was. She took her shoes off and tiptoed out of there as fast as she could, and ran to her car. She never believed she could be so scared."
D' Anton was stepping back, shaking his head, palms held out in denial.