by Bruce Wagner
She was crying; he knew she was his.
“Throttle back, baby—s’all good. Didn’t know that, did ya? Didn’t know yer boy stole a li’l girl, that’s what he did. Cleaned her pussy real good with his tong. Made it bigger too—li’l girl like uh elephant now! Slap slap slap slap slap. Wet wet wet wet wet. Bet chew tight. Bet chew tight like that li’l girl used to be. You looks like a cow, but ahl betchew got a seven-year-old girlie hole! Betchew gotta hole like a calico cat! Best let me at that hole or yer boy’s goin’ down, unnerstan’? They killim! Killim in jail! Killim! Killim! Killim!” He bit her neck and dug at the crotch of her donated skirt. “Gun let me fuck you? I likes big girls, ooh! Gunna haff to take them hearing aids out to do yer ears! Make you heer again! And I likes you ’cause you cain’t talk, ooo! Gunna do yer mouth, ooo! An yer ass, ooo! Gun do that li’l calico cat pussy, ooo! ooo! ooo!”
He had gambled and won—he owned her now. Like a hunter, he’d watched the couple stroll the Promenade arm in arm, Jane with curls and tendrils piled atop her head like a loopy career girl, Topsy smoking his Rite Aid pipe. The beggar snarled at the domesticity of it, wondering what exactly was between them. When he first had his big idea, he wasn’t sure she’d believe his accusations or his threats—that he was the only thing that stood between her boyfriend and jail—he only knew he wanted her bad enough to play it out. Gut have that deaf-dumb cow. And it made perfect sense when she heard it, because Jane had always seen that her William’s eyes shone with something more than the brushfire flames of now diminishing hallucinations; but rather, with the awareness that someone, something, was after him—on the trail of the man she dared call husband. She had misread whatever it was William saw gaining on him (his old life); regardless, Jane Scull would let no harm come to her man, and it was upon that sentiment Please-Help.-Bless preyed.
More than any of it, she felt the awful familiarity of this monster, who was, alas, a member of her tribe, and began finally to consider that the Lord might have made her for such men. Yet along with the shame and agony attending such a realization came a measure of peace.
CHAPTER 33
Assisted Living
While the currents of our main story pull inexorably toward the tributaries of denouement, it is an opportune moment to look in on Mr. Dodd Trotter, whose fortunes this week have fallen, bidding him to flutter from his perch on Forbes’s global tree of the “world’s working rich,” and comfortably resettle five or six branches down. As to the wisdom of our timing, opinions as usual may vary; yet each player asserts himself in his own way, with his own urgency.
The day before his mother’s eviction from chez Pullman and subsequent hospitalization, Dodd was finally on his way to meet Dr. Melvin Janklow, the genial Beverly Vista psychologist who had once talked him through the hard times of his youth. (In the few months that had elapsed since that first phone call, their dinner date had for one reason or another been postponed.) He’d flirted with the idea of Trader Vic’s before discarding the Polynesian-themed restaurant as too kitschy, regardless of all the fond boyhood associations. He had Frances-Leigh make reservations at Michael’s instead, at the beach.
Dodd’s jet landed around six o’clock at the Van Nuys airport. He had spent the day in North Carolina, touring a private school. The Cary Academy had been built a few years before the millennium by his friend Jim Goodnight, co-founder of a data warehousing software company; Jim only had about $4 billion but, as Dodd used to joke, “that didn’t make him a bad guy.” The complex sat on about fifty acres—ten times that of the current BV “footprint” but only twice the size of the extended parcel that Dodd envisioned once surrounding homes and apartments were razed. The dogged CEO had built Cary from the ground up; its design technologies and dedication to learning were superb. Seeing what a determined man like Jim could do in such a short period of time absolutely impressed and inspired.
Dr. Janklow was sitting at the bar when Dodd came in. He wore a jacket with suede elbow patches, as in days of old, and rose to give his former patient a hug. The retired therapist looked on the fragile side; cancer wars had taken their toll. Dodd understood he was probably nervous, too, not being accustomed to the hoopla of a chauffeur-driven night out. They were quickly ushered to an outdoor table.
Space heaters cut the crispness in the air. Dodd politely asked the doctor (who futilely insisted on being called Mel) for a précis of his life the last thirty-odd years. The truth was, the billionaire couldn’t have cared less—his indifference stemming not from callous self-absorption but from a desire to freeze Melvin Janklow in time, as he remembered him, patched-up arms warmly extended in a crinkly-eyed hello, the underground priest of a small church—Church of the School Psychologist—that had been Dodd’s refuge over so many troubled semesters.
“Well, you know, I’ve been sick! That takes up lots of time. Oh Jesus—got hit with prostate, then skin, then breast. Breast cancer! That’s not a typical thing, not for men. But you learn to look on the bright side: never got it in the brain, balls or palate. Saw those characters when I went for chemo. ‘Pretty work,’ as my Southern auntie used to say—ghoulish. But you don’t want to hear about all that. Tell me about yourself, Dodd! Marcie says you’re pretty high up there on the Forbes heap. I think that’s all kind of silly myself. Do you really have that much money?”
“I have a lot, but I never see it.”
Dr. Janklow was tickled. “I like that,” he tittered. “You never see it! Who wants to see old dirty dollar bills anyhow?”
They reminisced awhile before Dodd got around to asking if he was aware of the sad state their alma mater was in, what with the seemingly permanent bungalows and school board entropy. The doctor nodded gravely and said that Marcie Millard sent him a petition bemoaning a bureaucracy that dared allow the halls of learning to remain in such prolonged post-earthquake disrepair. It was obscene. Dodd spoke of his vision for “the new BV,” an academic phoenix risen from the ashes.
“Well,” said the doctor, after getting an earful, “it does sound a bit grand, but why not? Why should the good folks of Beverly Hills be denied? I think it’s a hell of an idea, David.”
Dodd smilingly overlooked the misnomer.
“But what can I do? Now, what would you want with an old retired windbag with three cancers?”
“For me, tradition is very important. Dr. Janklow, if we can make this thing happen, I’d like you to have an office there—as an emeritus. You could come in whenever you like. Of course, you’d be salaried. If all this does come to pass—and my lawyers and friends on the school board are giving me every indication it will—I’d like very much if you stood alongside me during the ground-breaking.” The dinner guest was flustered to speechlessness, but Dodd was just gathering steam. “I want to be able to look around and see old friends and mentors, so there’s a continuum. See, I’m one of those people who remember things: I remember you taking the time to come to my family’s house on Roxbury Drive for supper. That meant a lot to me. You didn’t have to do that—no one paid you extra or wrote about it in the Courier. I think you just thought it might make a difference. I remember some of the other kids finding out … and for a few days, I felt just a little more important, a little more comfortable in my own skin.”
The doctor looked sternly contemplative, as if working through a knotty math problem. “I have a confession to make.” He pushed around an endive with a fork. “For weeks I’ve been racking my brain. Who is he?” He paused dramatically. “Who is that boy?”
Dodd’s face froze in a half smile. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Now, the only thing I can come up with is the trauma—I went through an awful, terrible time right about then. My wife and I were separating, a protracted thing. That’s the only explanation I can give! Because even after three cancers, my mind has remained agile as ever. The Millards’ll tell you. One thing I’m not and never have been is a forgetter.”
“Forget—”
“What I am trying to say,
what I feel genuinely terrible about, is that I cannot remember. Cannot remember—you—at all! I have racked my brain. I saw so many children, so many girls and boys. Had so many dinners—feathers in the parents’ caps, but they took a toll. Oh yes they took a toll. And that was fine, I was happy to do it! Would do it again. If it’s true that I was of some small comfort—and you said yourself it was a good, a worthwhile thing—then my, my … they were all good, wonderful children. Through the years. And you wouldn’t have been the only one! Heavens. But where did you say you lived? Roxbury? South or north? Well, of course it would be north …”
“It was actually south.”
“Well—but you—you say it was twice a week you came? How is that possible? Twice a week! I have racked my brain. Even looked through the yearbooks—I’ve got every single one—you weren’t in any of the yearbooks—”
Though crestfallen, Dodd gamely rallied. “I always arranged to get sick when those picture-days came around.”
The doctor laughed hollowly. “I can only say it has to have been because of my marital difficulties—which of course I had to shield not only from the students but from faculty as well. Took an enormous toll.”
“I’m sure it will come back.”
“I feel so foolish. Your generosity—I thought by seeing you it would jog my memory. Awful to say! It’s the damnedest—what was it that we talked about? In my office … Did you have a specific problem?”
“I imagine it was nothing that unusual,” he said cordially, “in terms of the type of thing you heard from most of the kids who came to see you. And the advice or support that you gave.”
“So many of the children’s troubles were alike; that’s true today too, no?—hard to distinguish. Have you changed much?” Dr. Janklow squinted at him. “I mean, physically? From when you were—from those days? Because you look like the type who might have—”
“Nothing dramatic.”
“It’s just extraordinary that I can’t recall! Your father wasn’t in television, was he?”
The next afternoon was an active one. After visiting his mother in the Louis and Bluey Trotter Family wing at Cedars, he returned home to find his old friend Samson Dowling in the living room.
Joyce sat off to one side while the detective faced the children, grouped in a semicircle on the emerald-green Roche-Bobois sectional. Edward had insisted on motoring up from the Boar’s Head for the interview; he would not have Olde CityWalk invaded by “the Spanish Inquisition.” (Though with a secret lodger in the attic, the setting certainly would have been more dramatic.)
Toulouse had of course already met the dapper Mr. Dowling, but the pleasure was a first for first cousins. Needless to say, Lucille Rose was smitten. Basking in the mannish cloud of their interlocutor’s aftershave, eager for some of his authenticity to rub off on her authorial side, she could barely contain herself; it didn’t hurt that the detective, as later described in a Smythson BIRD NOTES paean, resembled nothing less than a “Grecian god.” For his part, Edward, swathed in fine brocade, was haughtily up for an old-fashioned game of cat-and-mouse. Only Toulouse lagged behind, quietly, nervously, dubiously hoping that as the son of the detective’s ladylove he might at least be given special dispensation—the slack would help camouflage his fear of inadvertently giving Amaryllis away.
The gang of three stuck to their prefabricated story, of which happily enough many details were true. They had first taken pity on the urchin, they said, after a random meeting on the set of Boulder Langon’s film some months before. When the detective asked if she had been accompanied by anyone on that day—for example a “large-built bearded man”—the gang’s denial was in easy unison. Did you invite her to the house? Naturally not! came their nearly indignant response. Did she contact you? Not until way later, said Lucy—we never gave her the wherewithal. She showed up at school, said Edward. A servant poured coffee for the detective and replenished a tray of Le Marmiton sweets. Edward offered that the girl told them she had learned about Four Winds from a magazine profile of the aforementioned Ms. Langon. (“I believe,” said the braided gumshoe-in-training, “the periodical goes by the name of Twist.”) Samson asked where the runaway had gotten her dress and Lucy confessed she had been the culprit. A quick glance at her mother revealed the woman looking rather charitable; even a homeless child deserved to look her best.
“You see, Detective,” said Lucy, “I’ve been working on a project about the disenfranchised—our whole class has. We’re creating mobile environments for ‘urban nomads.’ The goal is to legitimize the status of the homeless in their communities. The house I designed has sleeping quarters and a receptacle for scavenged cans and bottles. But when I saw this girl, my project went out the window! I just wanted her to have cool clothes!”
Edward asked if they had done anything wrong—i.e., did they stand accused of aiding and abetting a crime? No, said the detective—that was a bit harsh. What you should have done was come to your parents and told them about the girl so that she could be properly helped. Samson turned to Toulouse, who’d been clucking and nodding his head in consternation and agreement with the others, and asked how long she had been in the group’s “custody.” Well, said Toulouse, not very long. The children looked from one to another, and the detective read their secrets.
Edward said to his sister through the veil: “Would you say two days or three?”
“Oh, maybe three—no more than three!”
The detective wanted to know where the girl had been staying. Edward said in the sukkah, but instantly regretted it, for that placed her at Stradella House a number of weeks back. He corrected himself by adding somewhat ridiculously that she had stayed in the remains of the sukkah, because, homeless as she was and accustomed to sleeping under the stars, she had declined their invitation to come indoors. Samson sipped his coffee and asked where the girl was now. We don’t know, said Toulouse. Do you mean, said the detective, that in the last few hours she ran away?
Yes! said Lucy mindlessly.
Tull spoke up: “She didn’t say anything—I mean to us—but she probably recognized you. When she saw you at the maze. My mom said that you—and she … [he couldn’t bring himself to say “Amaryllis”]—well, that you knew each other. From some sort of detention place. So that was probably why she ran away again.”
Lucy frowned while staring at her hands in remorse: “I told her I was making her a character in my new book—I’m writing a book you know, called Mystery of the Blue Maze. Though maybe it should be Mysteries. Mr. Hookstratten’s already sent some chapters to a publisher in New York. He said he thought it could be big as Harry Potter!” Joyce admonished her daughter to answer the question. “Well, when I told her that I was creating a character loosely based on her … well I don’t think she was very happy. Maybe that’s why she ran away.”
Edward said the orphan was already displeased at being the reluctant, somewhat humiliating subject of a school project on the indigent, to which his civic-minded sister spontaneously made a spirited defense.
In the middle of this staged ruckus, the children were startled to see Dodd smoothly if belatedly emerge from the shadows, rather like a nerdy vampire.
“You’d better tell the truth,” said the billionaire, “because if you’re still harboring her, then that is a crime. Am I correct, Sam?” The detective tilted his head ever so slightly as if to concur that, yes, by all laws of God and the land, the gentleman was correct indeed. “And if you are not providing the girl safe harbor,” he continued, “then any vital information you withhold—information that could prove helpful to the detective in his efforts to find her—the very act of withholding such information may ultimately prove harmful, even fatal, to the child. This, a vulnerable girl whom you purport to have real feelings for! And that, I believe, would be a felony.”
The collective pangs of guilt (each seconds long) aroused by his oration only weaved the gang’s resolve into a more tightly knit revolutionary cell. They would not give her up.
Lucy and Toulouse sprinted to the Boar’s Head like advance scouts. They rushed upstairs, to warn that they might be having “company.” But this never came to pass, Joyce choosing to stroll back to the house after planting a kiss on Edward’s veiled forehead.
Dodd walked the detective to his car. He suspected that Samson was dating his sister, but would never think of discussing such a thing directly; he preferred to get his gossip from his wife. They talked about the terrible business with Bluey and how Mr. Trotter was taking it—not so well—and where she might end up if home care became too “challenging.” They could simply keep her at Saint-Cloud the way his father said Jennifer Jones had kept Norton Simon at the beach house during his decline; the luxurious “assisted-living” environments probably would not do. She was past all that now. The Alzheimer’s facility at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills loomed hazily on the horizon, the irony being that Trinnie had almost finished the garden there.
Before Samson drove off, he expanded upon the reason for today’s visit: Amaryllis Kornfeld. Her mother had been murdered, he said, and the perpetrator was probably someone who had befriended the child. The man was still at large, and that’s why it was imperative that the runaway be found; if the two were in touch, she might lead him to the killer.