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.
"Don't worry," she whispered, leaning forward as if to follow him. "Gwen didn't breathe a word to anybody. It's their secret – hers and the famous surgeon's."
"No!" D'Anton almost shouted. "It wasn't me "
Her eyes narrowed in disbelief.
"You never saw me, did you?" he demanded.
"I didn't need to," she said, in her normal voice now. "Who else could have been here, driving your car?"
D'Anton exhaled slowly. "There's only one other person who drives that car."
"Julia? You can't be serious."
He turned away, clasping his head as if he was trying to keep it from exploding.
"You know how vicious she can be," he said. "I suspected it first when that girl, Katie, disappeared. I think there've been others. She's trying to compete with me in some insane way. Taking out her rage. It's been absolute hell to live with, but I didn't know what to do. Just hoped to God I was wrong."
His body sagged, hands falling to his sides.
"I think she murdered Eden," he said.
Abruptly, Gwen laughed, a sound that rang wildly out of place in the stillness.
"Tell the world that if you want, Welles," she said. "Gwen knows the truth." She slid off the desk and moved toward him, slowly and seductively, all full-grown woman again.
"You don't have to hide anything from her anymore," she said softly. "She knows you're the master sculptor. You're driven to push beyond the limits. To see how far you can take the living flesh, toward perfection."
"I'm not hiding anything. Haven't you heard what I've said?"
"But you have to remember, you owe everything to Gwen," she said. "It was her face, her body, that the world saw, with your name hooked to them. And you are going to keep her the way she was. She's done aging."
D'Anton's forehead furrowed in bewilderment. "What are you talking about? No one stops-"
She slapped his face, a hard stinging blow.
"She's going to make the Monks problem go away," she said. "And then, things are going to be like they used to be. You're going to make her perfect again, an inch at a time. From now on, she is what you do"
D'Anton looked into her impassioned eyes, his skin prickling with the realization that he might have thought the wrong woman was insane.
He said, with a quaver in his voice, "Was it you who killed Eden?"
"Eden's gone. Now there's just Gwen." She leaned close, all softness again, breasts against him, lips at his ear. "She'll take care of you, much better than Eden ever would have. And she'll keep faith, to the death."
D'Anton was starting to understand that the beauty he had created was making him a prisoner.
Then he thought he heard a stealthy sound coming from the hallway that led to the procedure rooms.
Chapter 30
Outside the windows of Larrabee's office, the sky was starting to lighten into dawn. Guido Franchi, Larrabee's detective friend from the SFPD, was sitting at the kitchen table across from Monks. Franchi was a big black-haired man with a drooping mustache, a heavily lined face, and skeptical eyes that were bleary from his being called out at five o'clock on a Saturday morning. They watched Monks steadily.
"So, let me make sure I got this right," Franchi said. "You left there naked, after having sex with this lady? Your clothes are still there?"
Monks had his hands pressed against his face, forefingers massaging his temples.
"I know how it sounds," he said.
"You admit you could have imagined the part about her trying to drown you? What with the drug, and all?"
"I don't think so. But it's possible."
Franchi leaned back in his chair, turning his mug of coffee in both hands, as if trying to warm it through friction.
'That doesn't give me much to work with," he said. "Right off, there's a jurisdiction problem. If she's still up in Marin, it's their case. If she came back to the city, I could pick her up for attempted murder. But how the fuck am I supposed to do that, when my only witness admits he was stoned out of his skull?"
Monks was still shaky, and he felt like there was grit floating around in his brain, but the drug seemed to be gone from his system now.
"I don't have any measure of how far gone I was," he said. "Either of you ever tried it? Ecstasy?"
Franchi shook his head. "Too New Age for me."
"Iris brought some home a couple times," Larrabee said. "It's great for in the sack, but it does twist your head around. What I'm wondering about, Carroll, how could she have known about the scarf? Or Martine?"