Double Take

by Catherine Coulter

  “You knew your actual self at eighteen?”

  “Naturally. I knew I had a precious gift from the time I was seven years old, a gift that demanded I use it to help others, to provide healing and comfort to those in grief. I try to provide counsel and hope that will also assist me along my own path to spiritual awareness.”

  “Mr. Tammerlane, you’re speaking of The Bliss?”

  “No. One must strive for spiritual awareness during the few years allowed us on this earth. The Bliss is what is after you pass from this world. I do not use that term. The Bliss is one that August adopted many years ago, and many younger mediums have embraced it. I think it sounds pretentious, rather too much like a bit of New Age feel-good nonsense. Sorry, Julia. However, August felt comfortable with it, as do others.”

  “What do you call it, Mr. Tammerlane?”

  “I call it simply The After.”

  “What exactly is The After?”

  “Simply stated, Agent Stone, it is the continuation of man’s after-death destiny, our immersion into the ultimate loving beneficence of a serene and infinite eternity. The After is the embodiment of perfection that we will dwell within, Agent Stone.”

  Simply stated?

  Wallace pulled a lovely gold pocket watch out of his white vest, consulted it, tried to keep Cheney from seeing that his hand was shaking. “My client is due in three and a half minutes. My clients are never late.”

  “Why are your clients never late?”

  “Why, Agent Stone? I charge them, naturally. My time is far more valuable than any of theirs, or yours, a common policeman for the federal government. I have a mission in this life and you are interfering with it, for no reason I can ascertain. You come into my house and insult me. You make insinuations about my poor dead Beatrice. I want you to leave.”

  “Wallace, don’t be so angry at Agent Stone. Like you, his mission is to help people.”

  “You’ve disappointed me, Julia, disappointed me gravely. I dislike seeing you with him.”

  “I’m sorry, Wallace,” Julia said. “But I’m concerned that the third time this man tries to kill me he just might succeed. And I must find out who killed August.”

  Cheney said, “I watched several of Dr. Ransom’s videos. He said in one of them that he believed that in The Bliss there is a sort of caste system—the more worthy the dead person was, the higher the regard everyone already there will have for him.”

  “Yes, yes, but what does that have to do with his murder?”

  “I’m not sure,” Cheney said, “but could someone have killed him even believing it would lower his own position in The After?”

  “August was right. Naturally some people deserve more consideration than others, whether it is here on this earth or in The After. There is little justice here, despite the efforts of the FBI or the police or our damnable court system, but in The After? It is entirely different there. No one who believed as we do about eternal justice in The After could have caused August’s violent death. August is basking in the fullness of what his innate goodness grants him in The After. Don’t you believe he is watching over you, Julia? What do you think he feels when he sees you allowing a stranger to attack one of his dearest friends? Your keeping company with this man does not become the widow of Dr. August Ransom.”

  Cheney said, “Do you believe in God, Mr. Tammerlane?”

  Wallace whirled around as if shot. “What? God? Do I believe in God? What I believe is there is more in heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  “So you believe in an eloquent oration of Shakespeare’s. What about God?”

  “There is always that which is beyond what we are, Agent Stone, what we think we know, what we imagine. There is always what is beyond death, always The After. But not some supposedly omniscient, all-powerful personage—God, Zeus, Allah, whatever, take your pick. No. These are man’s creations, formalized constructs—man’s attempt to explain what he can’t begin to understand. Every culture, every civilization has created some deity to comfort them in death, to explain the simple change of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, ever since we had words for those things.” He flapped his hands at Cheney as if to shoo him away. “I don’t like to discuss this with you in any case. Yours is an untutored mind.”

  He whirled around and walked away from them. He said over his shoulder, “You are incapable of understanding anything of metaphysical importance. You think in provincial paradigms— good and evil, Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil. This is fitting to a man of your station. And I am tired of your insults. Good-bye, Agent Stone, Julia.”

  Cheney smiled at him. “You’re not bad at insults yourself. I really would have liked to know who or what it is who doles out the perks in The After. Good day.”

  They left, passing by a man in his late sixties, huddled in a gorgeous cashmere coat, his face pale, his eyes lost and bewildered, his thick gray hair blowing in the stiff wind.

  CHAPTER 28

  As he drove his Audi on 19th Avenue toward the Golden Gate Bridge, Cheney asked a silent Julia, "How long were you and your husband married, Julia?"

  "Nearly three years. Then he was killed.”

  Would you have stayed married to that old man?

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-nine.”

  “I had a woman friend who said she was twenty plus nine.”

  She said nothing, looked straight through the windshield.

  “I believe he was in his late sixties, sixty-eight, I think.”

  “You think? You don’t know the age of your own husband?”

  “No.”

  “All right, you’re angry with me. Come on out and say it.”

  She whirled around to face him. “You’re a jerk! You were needlessly rude to poor Wallace. You baited him, you sneered at him. I’m surprised you didn’t accuse him of molesting teenagers!”

  “I thought about it, but couldn’t see any payoff.”

  She smacked his arm with her fist. “Wallace didn’t kill August. He didn’t kill his wife. Just because you’re a skeptic, you don’t have to act like an ass.”

  “All right, so maybe I was a bit over the top. Look, Julia, I’m not only an FBI agent, I’m also a lawyer. I have to see something, feel it, understand it, before I can believe it. And we’re pressed for time here—I needed to rile him to see what would happen. I didn’t have time to make nice. Do you understand?”

  “Be a skeptic, just don’t insult my friends.”

  “I’m thinking it would do you some good to have some different sorts of friends.”

  “You’re right, I do want some more friends. None of them will be cops, that’s for sure.”

  “Hey, maybe you’re more interested in Tammerlane than you let on. Are you sure you only think of him as a friend?”

  “You’re ridiculous, Cheney Stone. You sound jealous. Young men—I’d forgotten about all that testosterone clogging your brain cells.”

  Cheney wanted to yell back at her, but he reined himself in. “I don’t sound jealous, dammit.”

  “Forget it.”

  Since it was late morning, traffic wasn’t heavy on the bridge. No northbound toll, so Cheney drove right through.

  “I won’t tell you where Bevlin lives until you promise you won’t act like an ass around him.”

  Cheney sighed. “All right, I’ll be more light-handed with Bevlin Wagner.”

  “You swear?”

  “What will you do if I overstep my bounds—or rather your bounds?”

  “I’ll shoot you.”

  He laughed, couldn’t help it, and raised his hand in surrender. “Okay, I’ll be very cool with Bevlin.”

  “Good. Now, take the first exit onto Alexander and stay on it into downtown Sausalito.” She paused, looked out the Audi’s window. “I wish those blasted clouds would burn off. There’s nothing on earth more beautiful than the ocean on one side, the bay on the other, all glistening under a bright sun.”

  “Al
l chirpy now, are we, since you’ve got me in a choke hold?”

  “Yep. I don’t believe in rubbing salt in wounds.”

  “So you married August when you were twenty-six.”

  “You’re a dog with a meaty bone, aren’t you? Yes, that’s right. How old are you?”

  “Me? I’m nearly thirty plus three, in November.”

  She laughed, but it wasn’t a freewheeling laugh. “Why are you asking me these personal questions?”

  “Humor me, please. I’m trying not to be a jerk about it. I just need all the background I can get. You married him because you felt gratitude toward him since he was with you when your son died.”

  “You just crossed the line,” she said.

  Cheney drove the beautiful winding road into the town of Sausalito. Due to the heavy winter rains, the Marin Headlands were richly green, nearly an Irish green. By August, unfortunately, the hills would be brown and barren, a perfect setting for Heathcliff.

  “So what do you want to tell me about Bevlin Wagner? Other than he wanted you to marry him. Is that his real name?”

  “Doesn’t sound Croatian, does it? He told me he was from Split, a city on Croatia’s Adriatic coast. Evidently his parents changed their names when they came to the U.S. when he was a young boy. He’s never mentioned another name. Bevlin’s been on the local psychic scene for about eight years.”

  “He’s also a medium—talks to dead people?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, a psychic medium is your ultimate woo-woo master. Not only can he put on the psychic show—tell fortunes, see a building fall down before it actually does, see a murderer do the deed—he has the additional selling point of talking to dead great-uncle Alfie.”

  “That’s right, and you’re being an ass again.”

  He gave her a crooked smile.

  She said, “August told me once that Bevlin had no center yet, that he didn’t know quite who he was, or what he was supposed to do with himself. But he was young, there was time for him, he said. August hoped he wouldn’t give up on what was in him before he found out what it was and how to use it.”

  “This guy seemed so intense—if it’s for real he’s got to be burning himself up from the inside out. On the other hand, when he turned that intense expression of his on me yesterday, I thought he looked like he wanted a drink.”

  This time a chuckle burst out of her, whole and clean. Good, she wasn’t as pissed at him. She cleared her throat. “I shouldn’t have done that, really. Maybe Bevlin does drink too much on occasion. I remember a get-together last year. Bevlin was ‘intensing’ everyone, as I think of it—you know, sitting in a corner pretending to brood and staring everyone down—until I realized he had a fifth of vodka behind him. I saw him turn a couple of times, sort of hunch over, and swig right out of the bottle.”

  “When his parents came to the United States, where did they live?”

  “New Hampshire. Bevlin always likes to say he’s from Croatia, first thing when he meets someone new—I think he believes it makes people think of Transylvania and vampires and things that go bump in the night—you know, it makes him sound like he’s steeped in otherworldly knowledge.”

  “Even though Transylvania is in Romania.”

  “I remember I said something smart-mouthed like that once to August.” She frowned.

  “What?”

  “August didn’t like that I’d said it, that I’d poked fun. Take a left at this first light, Cheney. Hey, would you look at all the tourists. They’ve got to be freezing.”

  There were a good hundred out-of-towners huddled in jackets on the sidewalks of Sausalito, giving their custom to all the scores of clever tourist shops on either side of the street, ice cream cones and umbrellas in their hands.

  “He didn’t like it? Why would he care?”

  “You’ve got that bone in your mouth again. August felt I shouldn’t mock a man who might have much to offer the world sometime in the future.”

  Cheney turned up Princess Street and began tacking his way up the hill.

  “Do you think Bevlin Wagner has a lot to offer the world in the future, Julia?”

  She stared out the window a moment, then slowly shook her head. “I don’t know, I really don’t. He has written one book on spirituality—To Watch Your Soul Take Flight. I have a copy, I’ll lend it to you. Read it. It—well, it helped me once.”

  “All right, I will. But how can you not be a skeptic? I mean, finding lost children, maybe even forecasting disaster, but really, talking to dead people? Give me a break. It sounds absurd.”

  “Everyone should be a skeptic, but keep an open mind. In the end, though, we all have to make up our own minds, Cheney.”

  “Why should I really care one way or the other?”

  “Because at various times in our lives we have need of something to help us make sense of things—of senseless tragedy, for example. I know that makes us more vulnerable to those who would deceive us—you bet it does. But if you’ve never felt ground under with despair or grief, if you’ve never been forced to focus inward rather than at your outward daily routine in the world, then I don’t think you should judge them or what they do because that inner eye of yours is closed to it, as they’d say.”

  “Inner eye?”

  “That’s their word for it. They speak of it as a door deep in our minds that cracks open occasionally, usually when we have need of spiritual comfort. Of course you can’t prove it with any sort of science or critical argument.”

  “Is your inner eye open now?”

  “No. That’s Bevlin’s house up there, perched right over the cliff.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Cheney parked the Audi on the narrow curb at the base of a dozen steps that led upward to an eagle’s-nest house.

  They walked up the thick old wooden steps to Wagner’s house, skinny trees and brush pressing in on either side—it felt like a small wilderness, dense and wild.

  The front door was ajar and so they walked into a small, dimly lit entrance hall. Cheney called out, “Is anyone here?”

  “A moment,” a man’s shout came from upstairs. “Go into the living room, on the right.”

  The small front room was all windows that looked toward the bay—the tip of Belvedere, Angel Island, even Alcatraz was in view. Beanbags, all of them bright red, were scattered throughout the room, some in small groupings, some alone. The walls were bare, no bookshelves, no photos, nothing but those dozen or so bright red beanbags.

  In less than a minute, Bevlin Wagner walked into the living room, wearing only a thick white towel knotted below his waist.

  “Hi, Bevlin,” Julia said, evidently finding nothing strange in this.

  He walked up to her, leaned down, and kissed her mouth, then straightened to study her face. “You look beautiful, Julia. I was so worried about you yesterday, you were so pale, so frightened.”

  She nodded. “I’m fine now. Thank you for taking the time to speak to Agent Stone.”

  “No problem.” Bevlin, the towel loosening a bit around his waist, nearly mesmerizing Cheney, said, “Agent Stone. I’m pleased you’re keeping Julia safe.”

  When in psychic Rome, Cheney thought, and shook the man’s hand. He wanted to tug on the towel just to see what he’d do. Bevlin Wagner was dead white, and his burning dark eyes and long black hair made for a compelling contrast. He had very little body hair.

  “I was in the shower, didn’t want to keep you waiting.”

  “You’re always in the shower, Bevlin,” Julia said. “Go put some clothes on. We’ll be right here when you get back. I promise I won’t let this dangerous FBI agent search the beanbags.”

  Those soul-probing dark eyes hit Cheney’s face square on. “I didn’t have time to wash my hair,” Bevlin said.

  “It looks clean enough, don’t worry,” Julia said. “Get dressed.”

  Bevlin left the room, whistling Bolero, if Cheney wasn’t mistaken.

  “He does this exhibitionist thing of
ten?”

  “Oh yes. It’s sort of his trademark. I don’t know why, since he isn’t all that remarkable a specimen.”

  “Has he ever lost the towel?”

  “Yes. He paraded out with his towel once when I arrived before August did. The towel hooked on a doorknob and whipped right off. I looked him straight in the face and told him I knew a really good personal trainer.”

  “He wasn’t insulted?”

  “Didn’t seem to be. He said personal trainers were too hairy except for the women, and they scared him.”

  Cheney laughed. “What’s the deal with all these red beanbags? How long has he been doing this?”

  “Ever since I’ve known him, and I don’t have a clue.”

  Bevlin Wagner came back into the room, wearing old gray sweats, his long narrow feet bare. “Agent Stone, I know you’re here to question me about the attempts on Julia’s life.”

  Cheney said, “Yes, I appreciate your time. Mainly, I’d like to ask you about Dr. August Ransom’s murder. There seems to be little doubt that the attempts on Julia’s life and his murder are connected.”

  “I don’t know anything about any of it, I’m afraid.” He looked over at Julia and blessed her with his sweeping intense look. “If only I did know something—are the two really related? Okay, maybe, maybe. Wallace and I wondered about that, of course. I must tell you this, Agent Stone, when August visited me last night, he told me he really doesn’t like you, that you might be dangerous, and I should be careful not to anger you. He’s displeased about your being with Julia. He didn’t say so, but I’d wager he’d be much happier if she were with me.”

  Julia said, “Bevlin, there is no earthly—or unearthly—reason for August to be concerned about Agent Stone. He’s trying to find out who garroted him, after all. Despite what Wallace says, I think August would want his murderer brought to justice.”

  Cheney said, “Bevlin, what you said, it is what August thinks, not what you think, is that right?”

  Bevlin walked to the huge front window. “Of course it’s what August thinks.” He paused. “The fog’s finally lifting. I have three clients today. The first one a batty old doll who wants to give all her money to a nice-looking young man who says he’ll set up a trust for her. There’s a big commission for him, naturally. God knows what’s in the fine print.” He shuddered.