Morbid Curiosity: Erter & Dobbs Book 3

by Nick Keller

  Dr. Weisman had been informed about that. He also knew that a man named William Erter had interfered. And thank God for that.

  “Yeah, they had me on everything under the sun. Duloxetine and Cymbalta, Valium, Lexapro, Xanax, and a dozen others. There for a time, psychotherapeutic drugs were in the forecast. It was raining pills on me. Some of you might remember. They had me pretty screwy when I first started coming here, remember? Yeah—of course you all know my drug of choice. My buddy, Jack. The doctors and therapists all said go to group. It’ll fix you. Guess that’s why I’m here. Get fixed.”

  “Do you blame yourself at all?” Weisman asked.

  Bernie inhaled big, thinking. “No. I blame—” he looked away seeing a ginger-headed woman in his mind, smallish, a little cute, hiding something like the devil behind her eyes. He saw Ruthi.

  Ruthi fucking Taylor.

  He hissed, “her.”

  “You blame—” Weisman leaned in for clarity and said, “Iva?”

  Bernie blinked, snapping out of it. Jesus, had he referenced Ruthi out loud? He had to be careful. No one knew about Ruthi, except the assholes who covered up the Starlet crimes. To everyone else, Starlet Killer was Raymond Komatsu. He was a patsy, though, an FBI’s most wanted. They’d be pretty pissed if he spilled the beans now. He redirected the conversation. “We’ve been through all this, Doc.” He groaned to himself denying every instinct he had, all of them telling him a different story.

  It wasn’t Ruthi he’d learned to hate. Ruthi had gotten what she deserved. He was glad to have given it to her. He’d tossed her eighteen stories off a building, heard her splat on the street below. But even that was no antidote to his pain. It didn’t fix what that sick bitch had done to Iva. Truth was, Bernie failed. And the one he loved most, died bleeding and screaming. No therapy, no drug, no realization of the truth would ever erase that. So, did Bernie blame himself? Was he responsible for Iva’s death?

  You’re goddam right.

  But he could never admit that to Weisman. Jesus, they’d stuff him back in the rubber room forever.

  He muttered, “It’s like you said, Doc.”

  “What?”

  “There was nothing I could do.”

  Weisman interlaced his fingers, cocked his head to the other side. “Do you think she’s still with you in some way?”

  “Of course, always.” Bernie snuffled at the thought. What a lie? What a ridiculous sentiment? She was gone, as in not here anymore. As in dead.

  “You’re very strong, Bernie.”

  “I’m a cop.” He shrank a little, had to rephrase. “Was a cop.”

  “And what are your thoughts on that?”

  “What, not being a cop?”

  “That’s right.”

  Bernie shifted in his chair. Another lie in three, two, one: “I like not being a cop.”

  “Bastards took that away, too. Crazy Bernie. Mad Bernie. Alcoholic Bernie. Even killer Bernie. Guess the force was done with me. I was excused, you could say. Here’s your pension for twenty-four good years. Bye bye.”

  “I know that your dismissal from the force wasn’t completely voluntary.”

  “Yeah.”

  “One might say, they made you leave.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any anger about that?”

  Bernie shrugged shooting for a conversational tone. He was damaged goods. The L.A.P.D. had no use for damaged goods. But, what the hell. “I got a good pension out of them.”

  “That’s good, Bernie, but it doesn’t really answer the question.”

  “No—I’m past all that.” And blastoff!

  “Good. Explain that.”

  “Uh.” He shifted his gaze around the room as if looking for the answer, finding the lie. He settled on, “It’s humility, Doc. Like you said.”

  “Humility?”

  “You have to give your trust and understanding and all that mumbo jumbo.”

  Weisman grinned. “You have to let go of your control to those who view you with objection, you mean.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “Do you believe that, Bernie?”

  He readjusted in the chair. “Yeah. Maybe. A little. I’m starting to. Didn’t always, but now, I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “Just makes things easier.”

  “And now,” the doctor paused as if for drama, and said, “you’re not a cop anymore.”

  Bernie jerked a look at him as if he’d been punched, then he melted. “Yeah. And now I’m not a cop.”

  “What about the self-medicating?”

  “None.”

  “No?” Weisman said, impressed.

  “Not a drop.”

  “How long now?”

  Bernie squinted one eye and gave it some thought. How long had he been in hell? “Four months.”

  “That’s excellent, Bernie. What are your thoughts on that?”

  Bernie grinned with sarcasm. “Clear.”

  “And the group?”

  “Mmm—they’re helpful.” Weisman looked at him wanting more. “I get up and talk, sometimes. Everyone cries. It’s uh—”

  “It’s what?”

  “Embarrassing.”

  “Takes strength, doesn’t it?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  Weisman looked at him proudly, grinning. “And how’s your new enterprise coming?”

  “So I got this thing. Weisman—that’s my psychologist—said it was time. It’s a venture, I guess. Should keep me busy, anyway; make me feel useful. At least that’s what Weisman thinks. I guess the truth is, there’s not much else a guy like me is good for. Surprise, surprise, right? So, I’m giving it a shot. Bernie Dobbs, Private Eye. Sounds stupid, but, what the hell?”

  “The venture? It’s moving forward,” Bernie said. For once, he didn’t have to lie.

  Weisman straightened, interested. “The loan came through?”

  “Yeah. With help.”

  “What help?”

  “I own assets. The house. I have a boat I never use. They seemed to like my experience with the law.” He cleared his throat. “Your referral was helpful.”

  “That’s fantastic, Bernie. So you got the space.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Over on Whittier, by the seven-ten.”

  “Okay. So,” he slapped his thighs, “what’s next?”

  “Clients, I guess.”

  Weisman said, “Bernie, I think that’s wonderful. A man like you needs something to do, something to keep him occupied. And I think it’ll put your specific talents to good use.” He leaned back. “This ought to fit that bill nicely.”

  “Yeah,” Bernie said.

  “Have you come up with a name, formally?”

  “No. Well, I don’t know. I was thinking maybe just Dobbs, or Dobbs Investigative Services or something.”

  “I truly hope this pans out for you, Bernie, I truly do. You deserve it.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see.”

  Weisman stood and paced over to his window looking out. He turned back conversationally and said, “You ever think about bringing on a partner?”

  Bernie furled his brow. The very word partner made him quiver. “A partner?”

  “Sure,” Weisman said, moving back from the window. “Many of these investigative firms have teams. You could bring on a specialist or two. Make a full office out of it.”

  “Heh,” Bernie said, “you watch too much TV, Doc.”

  He sat back down. “Oh? Meaning what, exactly.”

  Bernie shook his head, tight-lipped. “Me and partners—I’ve had plenty partners. Always get in the way. Always tripping me.”

  The AA group looked on at Bernie as he went into a long pause, as if the moment of silence was supposed to fill in any conversation he might have about his last partner. It didn’t. It just filled the room with tension and he started to sweat. He finally blurted, “Well, let’s get some goddamn cookies, now.” Everyone laughed and Bernie
successfully avoided the topic.

  “You work alone,” Weisman said.

  Bernie said definitively, “Yeah, I work alone.”

  “Fair enough, then. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Bernie stood, moved to the window, looked out. His last partner had ripped him apart. It hadn’t been intentional. It was just the nature of things. Bernie had learned from him in very specific terms where he stood in the world. He stood alone. Mingling with other humans on a personal level—yeah, that was very bad shit. Especially with humans like William Erter.

  And before he knew it, the inevitable truth came blurting right out of his mouth. “Yeah—don’t want no damn partner.”

  26

  Silence

  William opened his eyes. His head pounded. The pain was dull and throbbing, and it came in waves, made him open his jaw, pop his ears. Next was the pungent scent of body odor and mildew, like something ancient had died. It made him grimace. Yes, he was awake.

  He shook his head, popped his neck. Everything hurt as if he’d slept on a concrete floor. Then he realized he had. Groaning, he pushed himself into a sitting position noticing for the first time that his hands were bound together in steel bracelets. He was handcuffed. There was a chain anchoring him to a huge cone of free-sitting concrete. He tugged on it, but the thing probably weighed a full ton. It wouldn’t budge, and the chain was hardly two feet long. He couldn’t even stand fully upright. He grumbled to himself. Like father, like son.

  A voice came to him like a dream. It was low, almost peaceful. It said, “There appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.”

  William craned a look to his right. A man was there sitting on a surgeon’s stool not moving, just a statue silhouetted by the greasy, yellow light beyond. His features were sharply clear, and William could see his profile—the angled arc of a Grecian nose, a smart, vertical brow, angular cheekbones. It was a handsome face, if not dour.

  The man continued murmuring, “What did Elijah see? Do you think he saw this God?” His head turned slowly, swiveling on a wiry-thin neck exposing the other side of that face. It was a matted layer of tumors, like dollops of purple flesh wrecking whatever symmetry there might have once been, misaligning the jaw and tugging the left eye into a sloping shape. “Or the devil?”

  William flinched away rattling the chain. The right side of that face was recognizable. He’d seen pictures of this man. Dr. Hugh Graves.

  But the left side was a macabre facsimile of a human head.

  Graves smiled sadly. “I don’t read the Bible. I don’t like it. It’s a frightening book, full of damnation. Do you think I’m damned? Do I look damned?” William looked away from that monstrous face making Graves chuckle at him. “Did God damn me, or did science? You see, that’s the question I must ask. That’s the question I must answer.”

  Graves sat on his stool in silence causing William to squint at him. The man’s thoughts were hard to read, hidden under layers of this new grotesquery. “Do you know what gamma oscillations are?” He waited for William to answer. Graves twirled an operation utensil in tiny circles around his temple to imply the brain and said, “They’re frequencies inside the brain that carry energy—bands of memory—back and forth from the frontal lobe to the rear of the brain, a place called the Calcarine Fissure. At times, the entire brain can become awash in these gamma oscillations. Many things produce them. An old scent. A voice from the past. The sound of a mother’s whisper. But nothing produces them as powerfully,” he locked eyes with William and said, “as death.” A pause went between them before Graves continued, “You see, in that moment, beauty and morbidity hold hands like lovers on a white beach awash in black, deep waters. They say that’s our experience of heaven, gamma frequencies oscillating inside our brain. But is it?”

  He laughed bitterly, hopelessly. “Does that make you feel better or worse to know that heaven may be a fairy tale, that science itself gives to us the experience of heaven?” His eyes drifted away and he breathed, “And then that forever dreamless sleep.” He shrugged and said matter-of-factly, “That’s what I need to know. I have to have it, you see? Because,” He put his fingers to the tumors on his face and caressed the dozens of shapes, the hundred loping lines. “Nothing can stop the inevitable. Ascending this mortal coil is the sum of all our parts. But for me, time draws nearer. And I’m afraid all my parts won’t add up to that horrible sum.” His eyes lolled over to look at William. “I will meet death with deficiency.”

  William’s eyes went into slits as he looked at him with four parts terror, one part fascination.

  Sudden rattling emitted taking both their attention. Something struggled over in the shadows. William fought to see. It was Mark Neiman still bound to his deathbed, convulsing and banging on the operation table.

  Graves got to his feet and went over to his patient. He inspected the IV needle in Mark’s arm. William blinked, looked hard. A thick serum that looked inky black in the low light drew up from the adrenal vein into a clear tube and collected inside a bottle hooked to a chrome tripod. From there, the serum dripped through a spout collecting in a bucket at the floor. William’s eyes went wide. That wasn’t some dark medical serum. That was blood. Mark’s blood. The monster with the broken face was draining his own patient, bleeding him slowly. He was making the heart cease.

  Kick-starting these gamma oscillations.

  Graves let out a gasp. “It’s happening,” he cried. He flipped a switch on a standing dialysis machine next to the operation table. The thing hummed to life, tiny motors setting inside it readying to operate. Graves slid the bucket across the floor and plunged a second stretch of tubing into it, popping the cap and setting it open-ended into the bucket. Blood began drawing up the tube and into the dialyzer. “Circulate,” he cried.

  “Help him!” William screamed, but no sound came from his voice. The soundlessness of his own call surprised even himself. He tried again. “Help him!” Still, his voice wouldn’t engage, only a frantic breath.

  Mark’s writhing came to an end with a single violent contraction, and his body went still. The echocardiogram stopped pinging, went into flatline.

  William yanked on the restraints, jerking the chain hoping to rip it from the rock. He felt tendons reel against metal and begin to stretch. Everything throbbed. Screw the pain, screw the headache. He had to adjust for more leverage. He put his foot on his concrete burden and pulled, everything flexing until he collapsed back down gasping for breath, unable to look up at the scene unfolding before him.

  Graves put his face right up close to Mark’s, not inches away. His eyes were wide like a child’s at Christmas, watching and absorbing, hoping to catch that tiny flame as it lifted dainty and light from his eyes—the soul on its path to the ever after. Only a final, tiny whisper slipped out from between Mark’s lips and everything halted. Life, it seemed, slipped away.

  Graves’s eyes filled with tears, one of them rolling from that half-blotted left eye and began navigating its way through tumors. He made a dissatisfied face and slammed the operation table with his fists. “Nothing!” He unraveled a feeder tube from the dialysis machine, probed Mark’s left arm for a vein and slipped the syringe in, careful not to miss the vein. Blood began feeding from the machine back into Mark’s arm. “Faster,” Graves moaned, flipping switches, bringing the dialysis motor to a higher note. Blood pumped up from the bucket with greater pressure.

  Graves wheeled a portable HeartStart defibrillator machine over, fired it up and began rubbing the paddles together. “We’ll have to reengage the heart muscle, increase blood pressure. Come on,” he cried, as if attempting to save the life he’d taken. He put a hand flat on Mark’s chest feeling for the heart. Closing his eyes and concentrating, he waited. Waited. There! He could feel the heart swell. Blood was filling its chambers. He looked at his wristwatch. He had to give the artificial circulation time to move blood back into the arteries, fill th
e brain. “One more minute. On more tiny minute.”

  William watched through seething eyes. He was helpless. One more tiny minute—that was an eternity, a lifetime.

  Finally, Graves shouted, “Now!” and slapped the paddles across Mark’s torso. He flipped the thumb toggle and ZAP! Mark’s body jolted. The EKG machine still registered a flatline. “Damn, no!” Graves hissed, and refired the paddles. He attempted another shock—ZAP! Still a flatline.

  William closed his eyes, looked away. The implications of this place were utterly hellish. And here he was, stuck in Satan’s lair.

  When a third zap proffered no new blipping on the EKG, Graves slumped backward on the medical stool defeated. He put his head down sadly. Another patient. Another failed attempt. The paddles slid out from his hands and onto the floor.

  William couldn’t breathe. That sharp whine of the EKG as it continued to register a flatline seemed to be all there was left in the world. It swallowed him, consumed every part of him, belying the sudden, cold reality:

  Mark Neiman was dead.

  And William Erter was next.

  27

  Heller And Dobbs

  Bernie had spent the last six weeks making his venture look respectable. When he rented the space it was a dump, just a shabby little square duplex-style building that shared space with a small mom & pop bazaar next door, called the Mama y Papa Bazaar. Very original. It was on Whittier Boulevard smack dab in the center of massive confusion—shops, bakeries, boutiques, strip malls, traffic and honking horns.

  He’d painted the exterior, had a banner made that said Dobbs Investigations hung over the door. It was temporary. He had no idea what he would call his little investigative service. His mind hadn’t settled on one, hadn’t grasped the idea of anything permanent, and he didn’t want to pay for a proper sign until he did.