True-Life Adventure

by Julie Smith

  “Jacob told you about Terry’s illness, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lindsay was very upset. I mean extremely upset, Mr. Mcdonald. As I said, I don’t like talking about family secrets, but I was frankly worried about her. She said the pressure of Terry’s illness was getting to her, that she needed time off.

  “She said she was having headaches and couldn’t think straight. She was planning to take a leave from work. So what she wanted me to do was intercede for her with Jacob— she wanted me to persuade him to let Terry spend some time with her, to let her take Terry to Disneyland, things like that— just to be with her.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “Frankly, I was very worried about her stability. I said that of course I’d intervene, but that maybe now wasn’t the best time, that maybe she should think about getting professional help.”

  “You mean see a shrink.”

  Marilyn looked very pained, as if such a thing couldn’t possibly happen in the Koehler family, even to its ex-members. “I really thought it had come to that.”

  “What was her reaction to the suggestion?”

  “She got very defensive. I guess that should have been a clue, but I honestly didn’t realize things were as bad as they obviously were— I mean, I had no idea she’d kidnap Terry, or I’d never have let her pick her up.” She paused, as if reflecting, blaming herself a bit. Then she said, “You won’t tell Jacob any of this, will you? I don’t want him to know how bad Lindsay’s condition actually is. You can understand that, can’t you? He’s under a lot of strain, and nothing would be served by increasing it.”

  I didn’t answer her. I said, “Did Lindsay mention anything about Jacob’s treatments?”

  “What treatments?” Her face went white.

  “His treatments for Terry’s leukemia. Isn’t that what you’re working on here— a leukemia cure?”

  “I can’t answer that. But Jacob certainly isn’t treating Terry. Where on earth did you get that idea?”

  CHAPTER 19

  “A guess,” I said. Jacob had said “off the record,” and I always take that to mean “entre nous.” If he hadn’t told his wife, who was I to interfere?

  “A bad guess,” she said. She had recovered her equilibrium, but I thought I’d given her a shock.

  I said I supposed so and I thanked her for her help.

  Even though I had a date with Sardis, I drove back slowly, trying to figure things out. Marilyn thought Lindsay was crazy. Even Lindsay’s close friends hadn’t been too sure about her stability during the last few months. So maybe she was crazy. But what was crazy, anyway? Jacob wasn’t what you call your shining example of radiant mental health, and Joan was a little bonkers and Sardis was delightfully neurotic and then there was me. How much crazier could Lindsay be than any of us?

  And what, specifically, was Marilyn afraid of? She didn’t want Jacob to know how bad Lindsay’s condition was, but what difference did it make, really? If she hadn’t taken Terry to a cancer quack, what did Jacob have to worry about? Hell, he was a cancer quack himself, and now Marilyn knew it if she hadn’t known it before. What did she think Lindsay might do that could be so terrible?

  I was thinking so hard about all this I was practically creeping across the Bay Bridge, but no one seemed to care much. I had nearly the whole bridge to myself.

  Perhaps Lindsay had some history of mistreating Terry. After all, she hadn’t wanted children in the first place, and she’d apparently given up custody without a peep. But maybe it hadn’t been exactly that way. Maybe Lindsay had tried to get custody but couldn’t. Maybe she was an abusive parent and Jacob could prove it. Yet at one time they’d had joint custody.

  I decided that meant nothing— Lindsay could have become abusive during that period. On the other hand, abusive parents, as I understood it, were usually ornery only when their kids got on their nerves. Lindsay was an intelligent woman, however crazy. If Terry was getting on her nerves and she was knocking her around, she’d have enough sense to minimize her time with the kid. Especially if Terry were sick. She especially wouldn’t want to lose control now.

  On yet another hand, she wouldn’t want Jacob giving her a worthless cancer cure with side effects. Maybe she felt she had no choice except to get Terry away and hope she stayed on her own good behavior.

  But if she were as unstable as Marilyn said she was, the chances of that were minuscule. So that might be what Jacob would have to worry about if he knew, in Marilyn’s words, “how bad Lindsay’s condition actually was.”

  It was a thought, anyway. Did it help in figuring out where the two of them were?

  I was mulling that when I noticed a car behind me. I was going about forty-five, and as I may have mentioned, there was hardly anybody else on the bridge. There were several lanes open and anybody could whiz along as fast as he wanted.

  So there shouldn’t have been a car behind me. But there was; and the odd thing was, it wasn’t a small, light-colored car.

  Paul, my boy, I told myself, you’re the one in bad condition. You’re so used to being followed and threatened, you think every time a medium-sized dark car is out for a leisurely drive across the bridge, it must be up to something. A particularly dumb idea when the car that tried to hit you is known to be small and light.

  I’ll speed up, I thought, and when the other car doesn’t, I’ll know it isn’t tailing me. Up I sped.

  For a while the other car continued its snail’s pace, but when I really started to move out and put some distance between us, it started speeding up too. Gradually, fairly unobtrusively, but unmistakably.

  The Broadway exit was the fastest way to Sardis’s and far the most direct, but I whizzed past it and got off at Fifth. I was hoping to maneuver fast enough to confuse the medium-sized dark car and make it miss the exit. But I failed. When I stopped for the light, I saw that it was four or five cars behind me. I couldn’t tell if the driver was male or female and I couldn’t tell any more about the make, model, and color of the car than I already knew.

  I turned right onto Fifth Street and then right onto Mission. The car was still on my tail. I figured I’d better come up with a strategy pretty quick. I passed Fourth Street and then Third. I could always go to First and get back on the bridge, going in the opposite direction. But that would be dumb.

  Okay, then, Bozo, said I to myself, what would be smart? I was glad I asked. It came to me in a blinding flash.

  The Hall of Justice, which housed Southern Police Station, was only blocks away, at Eighth and Bryant. I had this assassin on my tail who expected me to lead him to the fair Sardis, or merely perhaps to a dark alley where he could garrotte me. Wouldn’t he be amazed to wind up at the Hall instead? Even in my pursued state I got a chuckle out of it.

  I turned right on Second and then right on Howard, just to make it interesting. After all, this was a chase, right? It might as well be fun. I flew down Howard to Fourth, down Fourth to Folsom, past Folsom because it was one-way, and turned right onto Harrison.

  To my delight, the dark car took the bait. It careened after me, not even bothering to disguise its purpose. I sped down Harrison toward Eighth, turned left and then left again on Bryant. The other car was right behind me.

  I considered just slamming on the brakes in front of the Hall and getting out and standing there, looking menacing. The idea had a lot of merit. No one would shoot you or run you down in front of a police station, for one thing. For another, there’d be a real macho satisfaction in it. And for a third, I’d almost certainly find out who was trying to kill me.

  But it seemed anticlimactic, somehow. This was my first high-speed chase and I wasn’t yet ready for it to be over. I wanted about half a dozen more cheap thrills before I went back to my humdrum life.

  So I kept going past the Hall and turned into the little street at its side. From my days as a police reporter, I knew it would lead to something really terrific— an entrance to the Hall’s underground garage, where
cops and public officials parked. Maybe the dark car would chase me around in there, all around between rows of black-and-whites; maybe we’d even crash into a few and I’d get my first demolition derby all rolled up with my first high-speed chase.

  You may wonder how I could be calm— playful even— with a homicidal maniac on my tail. Two reasons, I think.

  One was that I really did feel safe knowing there were cops all over the block. Another was that I sort of felt I was on the offensive, which I’d never been before with this particular maniac.

  Anyway, I turned into that little street, planning to turn again into the underground garage. But a patrol wagon was bearing down on me, more on my side than his and I mean this was a little street. I was a split second from a head-on collision.

  The cop in the wagon hit his horn, but I don’t know what good he thought that would do. There was no time to back up, and anyway, the dark car was right behind me.

  I guess he was just letting off steam, because thank God, he climbed the curb on his side and hit the sidewalk. I did the same on mine, whipped past him, hurtled past the guard at the garage entrance, and sailed into the garage, all triumphant.

  The only problem was, my follower didn’t follow. He whipped around the wagon the same as I did, but he had enough sense not to trap himself in a cul-de-sac. He kept going, while about half the San Francisco police force converged on me. When I shake a tail, I do it with panache.

  I’d like to have gotten out of my car and bowed with a flourish, but under the circumstances, there was nothing to do but stick-’em-up like a common societal menace. Because the converging cops all had their guns drawn. The next few minutes went something like this:

  “Fellows, somebody’s been trying to kill me and there was this guy tailing me and…”

  “Who?”

  “Well, ,at least I think it was a guy. I suppose it could have been a woman, but…”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Medium. Dark, and…”

  “How much have you had to drink, buddy?”

  “Uh, nothing, honest…”

  “It’s probably kind of dumb to ask if you got the license number, but just in case…”

  “Well, no, I didn’t.”

  “Do you have a history of mental illness?”

  “Uh…”

  “Drugs?”

  “Listen, now. I work for the Chronicle. There’s somebody trying to kill me, really.”

  “Press card?”

  “Umm, well. I haven’t been working there much lately and…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Look, my name’s Paul Mcdonald and…”

  “Yeah, yeah, we got your driver’s license. Move along now.”

  I moved along into the elevator that comes down to the underground garage to take prisoners to jail. Bet you didn’t know about that, did you? That’s why you never see anyone in handcuffs walking up the steps and standing around waiting for the lobby elevator. This way it’s ever so much more discreet. And a good thing, too, because I was currently in handcuffs.

  “Like I was saying, my name’s Paul Mcdonald, and if you’d just mention it to…”

  “Yeah, the mayor. Maybe the D. A. Now that we know it wouldn’t be name-dropping, we’ll say hello to all your friends in high places.”

  “…to Inspector Howard Blick.”

  Silence.

  “Homicide Inspector Howard Blick.”

  “You one of Blick’s guys?”

  “Something like that.”

  It seems they thought I was a murderer. Great little attention-getter.

  They threw me in a cell for a while, and then they came and got me and let me out with a couple of moving violations, which I suppose I deserved.

  “You talked to Blick?” I said.

  “Yeah.” The old cop letting me out was in a lousy mood.

  “And he sent his love?”

  “He said it was gonna be his misfortune to deal with you later, but if we didn’t get you off these premises before he had to come in again, he was gonna personally bomb the building, just because he was sure you were in it.”

  “He’s like a father to me.”

  Clang went the jail door behind me. It was a sweet sound.

  CHAPTER 20

  Sardis was sweet, too. It was nearly ten o’clock by the time I got home, and I hadn’t had a chance to call her, but she didn’t seem at all upset. She was curled up on her brown velvet sofa, Spot on her chest and a book in her hand, the very picture of serenity. Her rose caftan had crept up, revealing a pair of the prettiest calves in San Francisco. Every time I saw these legs I had trouble breathing right.

  She got up and kissed me lazily and didn’t ask why I was so late, but of course I could hardly wait to tell her. I did it while we put together a late supper of leftovers from Sardis’s opus of the night before.

  In fact, I caught her up on everything, including the burglary and my date with Marilyn. We chewed it all over, but didn’t come up with much. At that point there was only one thing to come up with, really— the whereabouts of Lindsay Hearne.

  “You know her,” I said. “Think. Where would she go? What would be in character?”

  “It’s not in character for her to commit kidnap in the first place. Or for that matter to want to be with Terry, particularly.”

  “Terry’s dying.”

  “Okay, that means she feels guilty and maybe maternal. The Lindsay I know is nothing like that.”

  “Dammit! Okay. Suppose it were you. What would you do?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’d be thinking about trying to get Terry well. I’d probably try a cancer quack.”

  “But she didn’t. So assume she doesn’t believe Terry can get better. She’s actually accepted the fact that she’s dying.”

  Sardis shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’d want her to have a good time the last few months of her life. I’d try to give her everything she wasn’t going to get later. Just a real good time, that’s all. Like that TV show— Run for Your Life.”

  I stared at her. In awe. “Disneyland,” I said.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “It was there all the time. So obvious.”

  “What?”

  “Lindsay even said it to Marilyn— she said she wanted to spend some time with her, to take her to Disneyland, things like that. That’s probably exactly what she wanted.”

  “Wait a minute. I thought she wanted to get Terry away from Jacob, who was endangering her health.”

  “I think she did. I think that’s why she snatched her. But suppose she hadn’t had to snatch her. Suppose Jacob had just said, ‘Okay, Lindsay, take her for a while. Have a good time.’ Then she would have taken her traveling, right? So just because she snatched her is no reason not to do what she would have done anyway.”

  “It would be safer, even,” said Sardis, getting into the spirit. “Because she’d be constantly moving. No one would know where to look because by the time they looked there, she’d be gone.”

  “Sure. Disneyland, first stop, maybe. Or maybe somewhere else first, since she mentioned Disneyland to Marilyn. Where else would you go?”

  “The Grand Canyon.”

  “Absolutely. Glacier National Park. Yellowstone.”

  “A mule ride on Molokai.”

  “A dude ranch.”

  “Skating at Rockefeller Center.”

  “Lots of things in New York— the Empire State Building, Radio City Music Hall.”

  “Europe, do you think? India? The Taj Mahal?”

  I thought about it. “No. I doubt Terry has a passport, for one thing, and if they applied for one, they might get picked up. For another thing, I don’t think Lindsay would want to go too far from UC Medical Center and Dr. Rumler. Terry’s not going to stay in remission forever, and I suppose she could become very ill very suddenly. Lindsay wouldn’t want to risk being in a strange place.”

  “So all we have to do is comb this country.”

  “Oh, Go
d!” I said despairingly. “They could be traveling under new names; they could have changed their appearance— God knows what they might have done.”

  “So where do we start?”

  I thought about it. “I’m damned if I know. We could ask park rangers if they’ve seen them, I guess.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Well, I know there’s a better way. I just haven’t thought of it yet.”

  “Why don’t we sleep on it?”

  “Sleep on it?” Sardis had just thrown another puzzling element into the bubbling brew I already had in my head.

  “Yeah. Sleep on it. You know.” She made a pillow out of her hands and put her head on it.

  “I don’t think so. I’m not tired.”

  Only exhausted. For some reason I just didn’t want to get in bed with Sardis right then.

  “Okay,” she said. “You mull it, Marlowe. Good night.”

  I mulled it for a while, but I couldn’t get anywhere. I followed her to bed and she rolled into my arms: “Want me to rub your back?”

  “Sure.”

  She was good at it. Not only that, she obviously enjoyed it. I could tell she was getting aroused; I wasn’t, but I wanted to be. Making love, I thought, would make us both forget this whole mess for a while. All I needed was a little encouragement. I rolled over on my back to give her the idea, and she was quite a quick study. She got the idea and she encouraged. But nothing happened. Meaning, to put it bluntly, I couldn’t get it up. A most embarrassing situation.

  “Uh, gee,” I said, or something along those lines. “I guess I’m kind of under pressure. I mean, this has never happened before.”

  Only with Maureen, anyway.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Don’t you ever have writer’s block?”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Well, it’s the same thing. You’ve got lover’s block.”

  “Oh.” Oddly, I was relieved. “Does it ever go away?”

  “Sometimes.” She put her head on my chest and closed her eyes.

  I couldn’t go to sleep, so I thought about the case. It was a way to keep from thinking about what had just happened. I thought the whole thing through, going over each separate incident, right from the moment Jack told me about it.