Hardboiled Crime Four-Pack

by Jack Bunker

  Melody calls to tell me she’s leaving her third pharmacy with no hits. That makes strike five between us, if there is such a thing.

  My sixth call is at a small neighborhood pharmacy that Google identified as the Spaulding Pharmacy, but it still has an old sign on the front that reads “Anteka Pharmacy.” The pharmacist is old and male, so I skip the flattery and cut to the chase. There’s nothing in the pickup box, but Ginger’s name pops up in the computer.

  “The Elavil’s expired,” he says. “She needs to get a new prescription from her doctor.”

  “Which one? Dr. Lynch or Dr. Whatsizname?”

  He double-checks the record. “Dr. Lynch,” he says. To make sure I heard right, he mimes hanging himself.

  I call Gloria and tell her I’ve got something new. She tells me she’s at Tina’s and I can come meet her there if I like.

  Fifteen minutes later I walk into an acetone cloud. Tina employs about a dozen Vietnamese manicurists, of whom none is available. There are five women reading fashion magazines in the cramped waiting area. I see Gloria in a chair in the back, her left foot and hand are soaking in their respective bowls of soapy water while Tina works on her right hand and an ancient fat woman squats before her, working on her free foot. I guess decades of Asian toilets have made the position comfortable for her, but my knees ache just from watching.

  “Have a seat,” says Gloria, nodding at a rolling stool. I draw it near and sit on it, swinging back and forth a little to check out the swivel.

  It’s somehow jarring to see Gloria playing the idle aristocrat, with exotic handmaidens primping her like a pedigreed chow-chow.

  “You look ravishing, my lady.”

  “Fuck you, too,” she says. “What do you have?”

  “You know that Elavil bottle you never found at Ginger’s house?”

  “Alleged Elavil bottle.”

  Tina chooses this moment to let the orange stick slip. Gloria grimaces as the stick’s point slides under her cuticle.

  “Well, it existed once upon a time,” I say, “and the label was inscribed with the words ‘Karl Lynch, MD.’”

  I expect her to be pleased. She’s merely bored. “What a shock that her drugs were prescribed by her doctor. It doesn’t take a genius to prove he wrote her a prescription. Even you were able to do it.”

  I let the slight pass. I know she’s fishing for a wisecrack, but she’s pissing me off, so I don’t bite.

  Tina finishes coating the nail on the injured finger and sprays it with an aerosol nail dryer. So much for the ozone layer.

  “I think you’re missing the point,” I say.

  “Which is?”

  “The killer got rid of that bottle hoping you’d attribute Ginger’s death to the gas and leave it at that.”

  “You think he’s never seen an episode of CSI? Everyone knows that stuff comes out in the autopsy. Especially someone with medical training, like Dr. Karl Fucking Lynch.”

  “Whatever the reason, someone deep-sixed that bottle to destroy evidence, and Karl Lynch is the only person it could have implicated.”

  FORTY

  Sophia agreed to meet me at Venice Beach, a community of contradictions. Dilapidated crack houses coexist cheek by jowl with $5 million paeans to postmodernism. Young taggers jump $500 skateboards off half walls while septuagenarian beatniks sell poems for spare change. You can buy knockoff Prada sunglasses for three bucks, but a cup of coffee can set you back five.

  The place was conceived in the early twentieth century by tobacco mogul Abbot Kinney, who wanted to fulfill his dream of an American Venice, Italy. A hundred years later, only a few of his canals still exist, and they’re sorely polluted. The boating lagoon has become a concrete traffic circle. And Windward Boulevard, once a grand promenade of Venetian-colonnaded nightclubs, now offers tacos and trinkets to the tourists.

  As I head toward the concrete fishing pier I pass a sun-bronzed bikinied blonde on rollerblades extolling the virtues of flavored organic lubricant to an ancient shopping-cart lady. Two girls and their wheels.

  I find Sophia at the end of the pier, standing at the rail near an old Mexican fisherman. She’s dressed in an apricot sundress with a single shoulder strap and asymmetrical neckline. The wind presses it taut against her, outlining her flat abs, wrapping her thighs, and flapping like Old Glory behind her. She’s an amazing sight. I snap a cell-phone shot of her watching the surfers bob on the gentle swell.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” I say.

  She turns. “They’re not doing a lot of surfing.”

  “They’re waiting for outside breaks, but the surf’s down. Don’t hold your breath.”

  “The world’s full of amateurs.”

  In profile, backlit by a cotton field of midlevel clouds, with the salty-sweet sea breeze flying her honey hair, she looks like a Vogue cover girl except healthier.

  I’m still sporting a bandage on my forehead. She notices. It’d be hard not to. “What happened to your head?”

  “I cut myself shaving.”

  It’s a weak joke but she smiles anyway, to be polite I guess.

  “What did you want to talk about?”

  “Karl, mostly. And why you’re afraid of him.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You said you didn’t want anyone you know to see us together. I assumed that was because you were afraid Karl would find out.”

  “I don’t want to hurt his feelings. He’s sensitive, and he thinks you’re out to get him.”

  The Mexican fisherman gets a strike. It looks like a big fish from the fight it puts up. We both wait to see it. The fish finally breaks the surface. It’s a halibut about the size of my pinkie. I expect the fisherman to throw it back, but he just leaves it on the hook and drops it back down by the pilings. Live bait. It’s a fish-eat-fish world.

  Sophia turns her eyes to me, and they sparkle from the late afternoon sun reflecting off the water. “Are you out to get him?”

  “I’m out to get Ginger’s killer. I suspect he did it. And so do you.”

  “No I don’t.” Impatience furrows her brow. She flicks her hand as if swatting at a mosquito. “He’s a wonderful man. I wouldn’t stay with him if I thought he was capable of murder.”

  “Everyone’s capable of murder. We just have different thresholds of motivation. I think Karl reached his when he seduced Ginger in therapy and she threatened to expose him.”

  “You’ve got no proof of that!” She’s getting angry. I try to ease up on the gas without losing my forward momentum. I don’t want her walking off in a huff.

  “Look, I don’t want to railroad the guy, but I’m an ex-cop, and my on-the-job training taught me that a suspect is guilty until proven innocent.”

  “I thought it was the other way around.”

  “Only in court. If you’re so sure he’s innocent, help me prove it. I’m not trying to judge his ethics; it’s hard enough keeping track of my own. But if Karl Lynch made sexual moves on you during treatment, I’m sure you worried about him doing the same thing to Ginger.”

  This assumption seems to have an impact.

  “I never said we had sex during treatment.” A half-assed denial without much conviction. “And I didn’t even know he was still seeing Ginger.”

  “Maybe you didn’t know about Ginger, but you knew he had plenty of female patients. You must have suspected him of playing around after what he’d done to you.”

  Her hands start to tremble. She grips the rail to still them and looks out to sea, squinting her eyes against the descending sun. As it approaches the horizon, it appears huge, reddish-gold, and glorious. You can’t beat an LA sunset over the ocean. The atmospheric distortion can be a thing of breathtaking beauty, the one and only advantage of smog.

  She finally speaks. “Have you ever seen a green flash when the sun sets over the sea?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “We’ll have to watch for it. It’s very rare, but I saw it once. With Karl. He brought me o
ut here to ask me to move in with him.”

  “Were you a patient at the time?”

  She turns her eyes to me, and they look deeper than the Pacific.

  “No. But I wasn’t particularly functional. He took me in anyway. Gave me my life back. Taught me I was worthy of love.”

  I pray that word won’t be the death of her. In my line of work it’s not unusual to care about the victims you meet, but that sort of empathy pales beside the ache I feel for Sophia. Why is that? I hardly know this woman. She’s in a relationship. Is my attraction to her affecting my judgment? Could emotional bias be prodding me to accuse Karl of committing one murder and planning another? Is he really that prime a suspect? Or is that just my wish-fulfillment fantasy? My way of trying to make Sophia available? The bumpy path of this thought makes me queasy, but I continue anyway.

  “If Ginger threatened to destroy Karl’s career with sexual accusations, he had a motive to kill her,” I say. “He had access to and knowledge of drugs, so he had the means. He slept downstairs that night, so he could have snuck out to do it. That gives him motive, means, and opportunity, the holy trinity of murder. What’s to stop him from slipping you drugs, too?”

  She bites her lower lip and turns her gaze back over the ocean. The sky is now aflame with the sunset, but neither one of us is in the mood to enjoy it.

  “He didn’t kill her,” she says.

  I feel deflated. I give it one more shot, hoping she doesn’t know enough about police procedure and privacy rights to know I’m lying through my teeth.

  “The cops have ways of digging these things out. They can subpoena his records. They can interview his patients. They can sweat it out of him. And if they catch him in a lie, they’ll assume he’s lying about everything. If you really believe he’s innocent, it’ll be much better for Karl if you help me prove it than it will be for you to sit back and let the police build a case against him.”

  Her gaze flits to me. I try to look sincere, like I really want to help the son of a bitch get off the hook. The deception annoys me, so I change tactics.

  “Look, Sophia. If something happens to you because I can’t persuade you to open up about this, I’m going to blame myself. And between my mother and my ex-wife, I’ve got more guilt than I can handle already. So I’m asking you: please tell me the truth.”

  She points to the sunset. “Here it comes,” she says. We both watch the last glare of the sun slip below the horizon.

  “No green flash,” I say.

  She stares at the blushing sky for several seconds before responding. “Buy me a drink.”

  FORTY-ONE

  We walk up the boardwalk to the Sidewalk Café. Several parties are settling up after watching the sunset, so we’re able to nab a table outside to watch the dusk disappear. The air is still surprisingly warm for the beach, despite the gusty onshore wind. Sophia orders something called a Sidewalk Slammer. I order a Guinness and some grilled Cajun shrimp to share.

  “By the time I turned twenty I’d quit therapy twice,” she says, “but each time I’d end up going back after a year or two. I was having a lot of short flings. I just couldn’t make anything stick with a guy. It was always something different, but I was always the one to break it off. Karl said it was because of my parents. They had treated lovers like cigarette butts, and I’d rebelled against that by developing an emotional block against casual sex. I couldn’t be satisfied sexually without being in love. That made me confuse lust for love, and that was drawing me into inappropriate relationships.”

  Our drinks arrive. Hers is blended and smells flammable. We toast before she continues.

  “He said I needed to learn to distinguish between physical sensations and emotions in order to lead a healthy sex life without getting emotionally steamrolled every time. If I could make this distinction, I’d be able to recognize a healthy relationship when it came along.”

  I can see where this is going, and it isn’t pretty. The steamroller image makes me think about Holly. In the driver’s seat.

  “He said he wanted to do some role-playing around it.” She pauses to take a long draw on her straw. From her wince, it looks like she’s tasted something off in her drink, or maybe it’s the memory.

  “He told me to concentrate on the here and now. It doesn’t matter if anything comes of what happens, because it’s only right now. Tomorrow, it’ll be forgotten, lost in the past. I can’t let my emotions control me. They’re just voices in the wind. It’s my physical sensations that are real. Let go of my mind and just feel the sensations in my body.” Her recall seems remarkably detailed.

  “Are you paraphrasing?”

  She laughs. “It’s like the first time you ever had sex. You remember every whisper, every little touch, how it smelled, how it felt, everything. This is that kind of memory.”

  Our shrimp arrives, lightly charred yet still juicy. She takes one and bites it off at the tail. Her smile indicates approval.

  “So he tells me to imagine I’m at a party. Imagine I walk into a back bedroom to get something from my coat and find a man there. A beautiful man, a sexy man, a man I’m immediately attracted to. He’s staring out the window, deep in thought. Karl says to close my eyes and imagine the man turning to me, telling me he’s been watching me all night. He says he isn’t sure he can control his desire for me, and I feel the same.”

  It sounds to me like the spiel of a nightclub hypnotist more than a therapist.

  “Karl tells me to let go of my fears, to live in my body, exist only in my physical sensations. The next thing I know, we’re kissing. I wanted it so bad. It felt so good. It just felt right.”

  I take a swig of my Guinness to wash a sour taste from my mouth. My stomach feels like someone is wringing it dry. I imagine Karl urging her to reject her feelings of humiliation, of self-loathing, of guilt. To purge the negativity that smothers her passion, that obstructs her ability to enjoy her own sexuality. To make that mind-body separation and revel in the physical pleasure for its own sake.

  She takes a draw on her drink, but it’s unconscious. Her mind is in another place, another time.

  “I couldn’t sort out my feelings. It was exciting and degrading at the same time. I was afraid to resist, because all my insecurities and paranoia were exactly the sorts of demons I’d been working to overcome. And I wanted him to want me. I wanted it so bad. But at the same time I felt so ashamed because I knew I’d started it. I tried to shut down my brain, not think about what I was feeling, turn the physical sensations into secluded little islands somewhere far out to sea.”

  She grabs her opposite shoulders to hug herself, and I see her hunched in Karl’s arms, her feelings chaotic, cheeks slick, body shaking. I envision her stepping off the emotional cliff, snaking her arms around his neck to hold on, desperately latching onto his mouth as if the sensors in her tongue can send proof to her brain that this is all in the name of therapy, in the service of healing. I see him driven by her ardor, hastily stripping her before the bubble can burst, unpeeling her like a ripe piece of fruit to expose her last vestige of privacy.

  “And then it was over,” she says. She’s back with me in the here and now. She grabs another shrimp but stares at it for a long time before taking a bite.

  “And?” I ask.

  She laughs. “I was actually thankful for the first time that it was only a fifty-minute hour, even though he let me run overtime for the first time in my life. I was still confused, but I remember being surprised at how upset he was. Even more than I was, I think. He kept apologizing for losing control. At first I thought he meant sexually, but he meant emotionally. He said he thought it would be therapeutic for me, but he hadn’t realized how strong his own feelings would be. He swore he’d never done anything like this before, and that’s when he told me he loved me.”

  She looks up at me with those eyes, expecting me to comprehend how his love had made her whole again. How Karl’s actions were suddenly justified, his abuse undone. The desperate plea in her eyes
reminds me of my first partner, kneeling in an alley, rolling over the man she’d just shot to reveal her vindication—a smoking gun on the pavement beneath him.

  “You’ll have to excuse my skepticism,” I say, “but did you really believe him?”

  Her face clouds.

  “Look, I’m not an idiot. I know what this sounds like. But if you saw his face, if you heard his voice, if you looked in his eyes, there was no question. He made me find a new therapist. He started dating me. And six months later, he asked me to move in with him. So I think the jury’s in.”

  I refrain from pointing out the irony of a courtroom metaphor, considering the possibility that she might soon face him in a courtroom, testifying in his murder trial. Somehow glib feels like the wrong approach to salvage the mood.

  “How do you know your relationship isn’t just his way of dealing with his guilt?”

  “How does anyone know? Half the marriages out there could be described that way.”

  “Half the marriages out there aren’t covering up a crime.”

  But she’s right about guilt. Holly probably would have left me long before she did if she hadn’t felt guilty about abandoning me. I think about my parents’ marriage. I always suspected they married because she got pregnant with my oldest sister. Guilt was the glue that held them together. And once Dad was gone, guilt was all Mom had left.

  “Don’t blame Karl,” she says. “I seduced him.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. It’s never the patient’s fault. Karl was your therapist. He had power over you. It was his responsibility to police the boundaries. He virtually raped you, and I think he did the same thing to Ginger.”

  She stands abruptly, knocking her chair over. People at adjoining tables fall silent and try to hide their stares with sideways glances. She pays them no attention. Her eyes are hateful, and I feel a sense of loss, even though I know I’m right. A passing busgirl rights her chair.

  “Who do you think you are?” she says.