“They’ve just got to get up, right after!” She performed a leaping sit-up that startled him. She landed on her feet on the far side of the bed, pivoted, and flopped, protuberances down, her head resting on her forearms, her expression all business. “Okay, enough philosophy. What do you want to know?”
“Why did you get a divorce? Your records about it all are sealed.”
“Figures,” she laughed. “Sloan’s got more secrets than the CIA, real and imagined.”
“Tell me, tell me.”
“He washes his hands constantly.”
“This I know.”
“Know why?”
“It’s been nagging at me. Ignorant fear of AIDS?”
“You could understand that, couldn’t you? No, Father—as Sloan referred to old Coughy—told him that to accomplish anything one has to soil the hands. A gentleman washes them as soon as possible.”
“Sloan took it to heart.”
“The man’s a compulsive.”
“You divorce him because of the hands?”
“Not at all. I can tolerate retentive tendencies.”
“If the relationship is profitable?”
“You’re fast, Prentice.”
“Just experienced, Patricia.”
“Sure you don’t play both sides of the fence?”
“The thought of a nonphallic frolic nauseates.”
“Too bad,” she said again. “No, I divorced him because he had quick hands.”
“Figure that would be a benefit to someone who fancied the afternoon roll about.”
“Not that kind of quick,” she admonished. “The sort that’s quick to swing. Never understood why some people accept violence in their lives. I never would.”
Inside LaFontaine stiffened at the thought of the riding crop in Brad’s fist last night. He knew he might be getting into another dysfunctional relationship, but damn it, he was lonely. Brad was different. News was sure of it.
He displayed none of these conflicting thoughts to Sutcliff. He projected the aura of concerned therapist. “Sloan hit you?”
“Three times on separate occasions. Three and you’re out as far as I’m concerned.”
“When did the hitting start?”
“Year six of our marriage,” she said. “I was in my house, he was in his. You didn’t know? Oh yes, separate dwellings. He preferred it that way, as if he was Prince Charles and me Lady Di keeping different shacks on the same estate.”
She sat up. “It was a nice arrangement at first. We got together in the afternoon every so often. It worked.”
“The modern marriage.”
“I thought so. Anyway, I knew Sloan was a bit strange when I married him, but—”
“All that cash,” News interrupted.
“An artist has two choices, starve and pray future generations remember you fondly, or …” she said.
“Live well and pray future generations remember you fondly.”
“So you understand!”
“Did you know that he beat and raped a woman during his college years at UCLA?”
The knowing smirk that had accompanied her easy bantering fell away, replaced by shock. “No … I didn’t.”
LaFontaine told Sutcliff everything the bank president had described.
She was quiet for a long time. “That poor woman.”
He nodded. “He has a sealed criminal case from 1986. Know anything about it?”
“No! From when? Eighty-six?” Her mouth hung open for a moment, then shut. She got up and walked around, snapping her fingers. “That figures, doesn’t it?”
“What does?” News demanded.
“It must have been July of eighty-six when the police came,” she said, talking more to herself than him.
“What happened?”
She tapped a finger on her lips. “You should probably know something else before I tell you. Sloan enjoys scenes. Every day must have at least one scene, one moment of high drama. ‘Apollo battling Dionysus’ as he put it.”
News made as if to interrupt again, but she uncoiled her fingers to stop him. “Hear me out now, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this aspect of his personality. Sloan operates in a money world. Where there’s money there’s tension. Everyone’s trying to figure out what makes the other person tick. Everyone’s got a hidden agenda. So much at stake in these mega projects. It’s perfect for him.”
“But some days are boring, right?”
“I used to have a saying, a drama a day keeps the weirdness at bay.”
“Catchy.”
“Words, paint, just different mediums, Prentice,” she said. “I hate to admit it, but the scenes were what got us together, Sloan and me. I was an assistant manager of a gallery over on Melrose. He came in looking to buy some art for his office. One thing led to another. He played Pablo Picasso.”
“You were Francoise Gilot?”
She rolled her eyes. “Dora Maar, please!”
“Sloan found your rendition of the artist-muse scene pleasing?”
“Married me, didn’t he?”
“Indeed. What about the event?”
“It’s coming. So anyway, when he’d have a bad day, no scene, he’d invent one. And we’d play it out.”
“Always as some cubist?”
“No, no, no,” she laughed. “Sloan has a ranging, if troubled, mind. Let me see, over the years there was Keith Moon and Janice Joplin, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Fred and Ethel Mertz.”
LaFontaine screwed up his eyebrows.
“I swear!” she cried. “That day Sloan even bought a cassette tape with Ricky Ricardo playing ‘Babaloo’ and put it on the stereo in the room just above us. Who else? One time there was Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Abbie Hoffman. Then Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx. I got to be cuttingly erudite; Sloan blew a lot of whistles.”
“But what about the cops?”
“Okay, okay. I was in Dallas July 1986. I came back at night. I saw a police car leaving the estate. I asked Sloan what they wanted. He decides to play Jimmy Cagney. Knocks me around, shoves a grapefruit in my face, screws me against my will.”
“Never told you what they wanted?”
“No.”
“Drunk driving, maybe?”
“Not a chance. Sloan controls his booze, like everything else in his life,” she said.
“But after that visit from the police he started acting violent?”
She nodded. “He was building a mall in Arizona at the time. Pressure scenes four times a day at work. He was on the boards of several charity organizations, more scenes. He was doing some fund-raisers for Portillo, the one running for governor? More scenes.”
“He came home and …?”
“Created grim scenes.” She tugged off her red glasses. The taut skin was now puffy. “They got darker. He seemed to be spiraling downward. No drama, just a foreboding of violent climax. I left, got a good lawyer.”
Sutcliff slid the glasses back on her face. “Help any?”
“Well, it makes me more determined than ever to find out what’s in that sealed case,” he said. “You know Robert S. Carlton III?”
“Bobby the banker? Died playing tennis. One of Father’s old cronies. Father knew everyone. Everyone owed him something. That was another thing the old man taught Sloan: there’s no greater friend than one who owes you.”
“What did Bobby the banker owe Father?”
She cocked her head. “I don’t know, why?”
“Because Carlton was Sloan’s banker on the project I’m interested in.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Bobby was like Sloan’s uncle, you know? Sloan even made him one of the Lollipop Kids.”
“The what?”
“You haven’t heard about them? Another thing Sloan got from Father. Coughlin set up this little eating club called the Wizards of Oz that grew into a philanthropic, good deed group. Very select bunch of old boys down there. It sort of petered out when Father died. Couple of years later Sloan formed its success
or—the Lollipop Kids. Most of them are middle-aged professionals, attorneys, developers, bankers.”
“You ever attend a meeting?”
She laughed. “Guys only. They’d have this big bash at his house every few months. I’d head to Palm Desert or San Francisco to shop.”
“You’re sure Bobby was a Lollipop Kid?”
“The oldest one. Sloan made him join after his wife, Helen, died.”
“Maybe being a friend was what Bobby owed Sloan.”
“Doubtful.”
“Sloan just won the right to develop twenty acres of the downtown waterfront. I think there’s something peculiar about the deal.”
“Guaranteed,” she said. “It wouldn’t be a scene if it wasn’t.”
News puffed out his cheeks and blew. “But, as far as the newspaper goes, I’ve got nothing I can print yet. Nothing hard and fast.”
“You just have to look close at everyone in on the deal,” Sutcliff said. “Figure out who’s got something to gain. Who’s got something to lose. You can bet Sloan will have all that figured out. That’s how Sloan gets all of his deals.”
LaFontaine looked at her thoughtfully. “If I come across something of interest that I don’t understand, may I ask your opinion?”
“For what it’s worth.” She grinned.
“Thanks for the help,” he said, reaching out to shake her hand. He headed for the door, turning before opening it. “One more question. If Sloan’s obsessed with sex, at those Lollipop Kids gatherings, were there scenes?”
She tapped her pouty lips with a single red fingernail. “I don’t know. But if there were that many guys, I know who Sloan would cast himself as.”
“Who?”
“Caligula.”
Behold a Pale Horse …
THREE HOURS LATER, AS McCarthy continued his vigil for Dusk, LaFontaine sat in traffic twenty-two miles north of the city, sweltering in the afternoon heat. He wondered whether today’s solar radiation-exhaust mix was bad enough to set the crazed Southern California commuters to wobbling and their fingers to quivering in search of the .357 Magnums and Glock 9 millimeters they kept stashed under their front seats.
Especially troubling was the pasty-faced guy with the snow-white hair ranting and pounding his fists on the steering wheel of the white Mustang in the breakdown lane next to him. Scrawled in fresh blue paint below the driver’s window were the words “Pale Horse.” A moment ago, the guy had leaned out his window and shrieked something about the end of the world. And what the hell was that moving in the backseat? A dog? No. A pony! One of those true miniatures you see at the circus! Oh, dear God, look at the twit’s license plate: “ARMAGDDN.”
News moaned. The world was coming to an end.
Or at least becoming so confusing he didn’t understand any of it anymore. He’d spent the better part of two weeks tracking Sloan Burkhardt and what did he really have to print? Nothing. He knew the developer had a violent, kinky past and a strong history of collecting dirt on people. The same could be said of me, News thought morosely. He supposed that if Burkhardt were a public figure running for office, the information Whitney and Sutcliff had provided would be enough to go to print with. But Burkhardt wasn’t a public figure and there weren’t any records on the rape at UCLA.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. There had to be another way to get at that sealed case. And what about the Lollipop Kids? What frustrated him was that he had no clear reason to believe any of it fit in with the Cote D’Azure development. He was overlooking something. He should sit for several hours and reread all his notes. It was something McCarthy did all the time, but it was just so much work!
The blare of a horn jerked him from his thoughts. The albino in the Mustang leaned out the window, eyes wide and pink, phlegm spraying from his lips as he pointed to a gap in the pavement that had opened up in front of LaFontaine’s red convertible Miata.
“Get your ass moving brother or a pale rider will haunt you!” the man screamed. The little pony whinnied and shied at the rear window.
The nut had a gun! LaFontaine popped the clutch. He jammed down hard on the gas, leaving forty feet of smoking rubber.
The traffic flow opened nicely after his chance encounter with the prophet of doom, enabling News to arrive at The Post newsroom at exactly 4:20 P.M. He would later describe the events to follow as “messianic,” for that afternoon he would witness a resurrection.
He trotted into the newsroom, noting with satisfaction that everything was as it should be. Ralph Baker in his best black leather and a new hair dye job had already spilled the afternoon coffee. Isabel Perez was happily writing in the vacuum created by Kent Jackson’s absence. Abby Blitzer and Augustus Croon were huddled by the police scanner, praying for a downturn in human relations. The Zombie’s dead fingers slapped the keyboard at a frenetic pace. Claudette X and Stanley Geld had emerged from the afternoon meeting and busied themselves assigning copy flow to the Stepford Editors. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, tomorrow’s paper was set.
LaFontaine dropped his briefcase on his desk, then, as was his routine, opened a file in his computer and typed in his notes [and opinion, in brackets] concerning his meetings with Thomas Whitney and Patricia Sutcliff. It took him thirty-five minutes to complete the task. He was tagging the file with a date and time as the system demanded when the phone rang.
“Mr. News?” said the elderly woman.
“Gertie, dear, what have you got for me?”
Gertie was his mole in the human relations department, a deep source he’d cultivated with years of chocolate confections, her singular vice.
She whispered, “You wanted me to keep a watch out on Mr. Jackson’s file.”
“I did indeed.”
“Just as you thought, he’s requested counseling, only it’s not marital, it’s psychological. He’s seeing Dr. Hoffman, two visits so far. The notation also mentions a gambling problem. And Dr. Hoffman’s prescribed a sleeping pill.”
“Poor man,” News said sympathetically. He told himself he’d get great information from Perez in return for this dirt. “What kind of truffles would you like, dear?”
“White chocolate with strawberries would be nice.”
“Consider them delivered. Thank you, Gertie,” News said.
He hung up the phone. He opened GOSDI, his daily journal of The Post’s underworld, and entered the information about Jackson. Done, he refiled the Whitney and Sutcliff interviews, hit print, and was rising to go get the hard copy when a divine finger reached inside The Post newsroom.
The scanner crackled and crackled again. The closely cropped hair on Croon’s head stood on end. Blitzer bent to the machine, then jumped in the air and cried “HALLELUJAH! IT’S A TRAGEDY! WE GOT OURSELVES A TRAGEDY AT THE POST OFFICE!”
She elbowed by Croon, stood on her tiptoes, and screamed at Claudette X: “A shooter right on the loading docks! Two down, six held hostage.”
Claudette X tugged at her ear. “Another postal worker? This is getting cliché. Let’s let McCarthy handle it as an item.”
The tiny reporter’s entire body was jerking now with the random fury of an epileptic in petit mal. “Gunman’s an albino! Got four weapons: two semiautomatic rifles and two pistols. And here’s the best part: he’s got a pony with him and he’s threatened to shoot it next!”
A gunman holding a pony hostage! “You’re gone,” Claudette X shouted.
Croon already lumbered toward the door, three cameras, two lens bags, and a light meter bouncing about his neck. Blitzer sprinted right behind him, mainlining on the promise of real-life drama. Margaret Savage stood from her desk and bellowed “I’m going, too!” She took off after them, a whirl of beaded hair and brilliant peasant cloth.
News called out, “Abby, did you say albino?”
Blitzer twisted in mid sprint. “A real pink-eye!”
LaFontaine raced toward Geld and Claudette X. “I saw him, the shooter! Not a half hour ago on the freeway. He waved a gun at me.”
Geld dismissed him. “So what. A gun in the hand is the California turn signal.”
News gave Geld a look of utter contempt. “An Albino with a miniature pony in the backseat? License plate A-R-M-A-G-D-D-N?’ ”
Claudette X dropped her huge frame into her desk chair. “Tie me up and sit me down. A Biblical tragedy! News, run the license plate through DMV. Find out who he is!”
Blitzer’s expression was blissful, almost serene, as she, Croon, and the P.C. Oracle raced down Broadway toward Fifteenth Street, the site of the city’s main post office. Out of the corner of her eye as she crossed Eighth, she saw a similar detachment of Beacon reporters barreling out of their skyscraper.
“They’re after it, too!” she screamed at Croon, already a half block ahead, charging the crowded city sidewalk as if it were a Middle East beachhead. He pivoted in full stride, saw the Beacon team, tore back, and grabbed Blitzer as though she was a football and dashed toward Fifteenth Street, where the sirens already wailed.
“Jeeeesus, Croooon,” Blitzer cried, her voice oscillating with every thud of the giant photographer’s feet. “Yoooou’re knock, knock, knocking the wiiiind out ooof meeee!”
“Sorry, Abby,” Croon said, mooning just a little bit at the little bit of a woman whom he held in his arms at last. “But we got to get there first or you’ll be pissed for days.”
No arguing with that. Blitzer took a big breath and held tight to the ex-SEAL’s belt as the photographer dodged through the crowd bellowing “Get out of my way! News media! Breaking story!”
Seventeen police cruisers, an animal control truck, and two ambulances from a veterinary hospital had already surrounded the main post office, a neo-Federalist building three blocks from city hall. The front of the structure faced Fifteenth Street and was lined with marble columns. The SWAT team was set up in the rear, about 250 feet from a series of loading docks. Somewhere beyond the steel roll-up doors of the docks an albino was holed up with two down and four held hostage. And a miniature pony.
A SWAT lieutenant named Tim Conrad, who respected Croon because he used to be a SEAL and Blitzer because she’d once held on to a speeding car just like cops did in the movies, let them cross the line.
Hard News Page 17