Dr. Knox

by Peter Spiegelman

  “Oh, you are fine, doctor,” she said, and giggled. “And pray tell: where exactly have I reached you?”

  “At my place, on the roof.”

  “As it happens, I’m not far from you.”

  “What the hell are you doing in this neighborhood?”

  “Well, not exactly your neighborhood, doc—I’m outside a club on Figueroa—a place some new Chinese partners wanted to see. They’re still seeing it, but I got bored. I’m ten minutes by car from you. Maybe fifteen.”

  “Tell me you’re not driving, Mandy.”

  She laughed. “I’m in back, all by my lonesome, doctor. It’s a silver Mercedes—keep an eye out. I don’t make house calls very often.” And before I could argue, she was gone.

  It was ten minutes exactly, and the silver Mercedes was an SUV, with smoked windows, black leather, a fully stocked bar, and a raised partition between the driver and passengers. Mandy’s spicy perfume wafted out when the rear door opened, along with the smell of whiskey.

  “Look at you,” Mandy trilled. “You’ve still got your little outfit on.”

  “It’s been a busy day; no time to slip into something more comfortable.” I squinted into the shadows of the back seat. “I see you had no time either.” Mandy wore the same gray skirt and fitted blouse I’d seen her in in what seemed like a hundred years ago. Her hair was still slicked, but her blouse was untucked and unfastened by a button or two. Her eyes were shining and unfocused.

  She grinned. “I did take off my panty hose, doctor. Now climb in here, before the wolves start circling. I’ve got a Sazerac with your name on it.”

  I got in and shut the door, and Mandy’s driver pulled away fast. I wasn’t quite seated and lost my balance. I landed on my knees, with my cheek pressed against Mandy’s thigh. It was firm and warm and fragrant.

  “Talk about a cheap date,” Mandy laughed. “Not a taste of your cocktail and you’re good to go! I do like your style.” I found my seat and Mandy handed me a glass. “Check that out.”

  I took a sip, and heat and then a cool, evaporating sweetness spread through my chest. I nodded. “I could get used to these.”

  Mandy had a glass of her own, and she took a drink and sighed. “That’s life-changing, right there.” The Mercedes turned onto San Pablo, and she looked out the window at the line of tents and even more provisional shelters, the campfires made of garbage, and the figures hunched around them. She shook her head. “Speaking of which—yours could use some changing. Your ZIP code, anyway. It’s like the fucking Dark Ages out there. Or a Bosch painting.”

  I shrugged. “Poverty’s not pretty; neither is mental illness. And by the way, this is your ZIP code too now—or your uncle’s.”

  She chuckled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “He didn’t tell you? Your uncle bought out my landlord this morning—all of his real estate holdings, including my building. That was one of several things he wanted to discuss.”

  There was silence for a moment, and then a stream of profanities I didn’t entirely catch, but in which “fucker,” “fucking,” and “high-handed motherfucker” featured prominently.

  “Guess he forgot to mention it,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, drinking. “But I shouldn’t be surprised. Information only flows one way with him. You know that son of a bitch had my office bugged?”

  “I connected those dots.”

  Her button eyes narrowed. “So, once again, I’m the last to know,” she said, and laughed ruefully. “Once again, I fetch and carry and do the trench work, so he can swan in and…You know, I was supposed to take care of this shit with Alex—I was taking care of it—and then…Can you believe he bugged my fucking office? That’s trust for you, huh? That says, I trust you with the future of this business, right?”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Let me get this straight, Mandy—am I supposed to feel sorry for you because your uncle robbed you of the chance to intimidate and coerce me, and to take Alex from his mother? Because if that’s what you’re—”

  She wasn’t listening. “This isn’t the first time with him—it’s not even the tenth time. I’ve had deals teed up in Alberta, in the North Sea, Nigeria, partnerships negotiated with the Indonesians and Australians, acquisitions agreed to, restructurings arranged, and in every case he comes in, in the eleventh fucking hour, and invites me to step away from the big table. To be a good girl and take a seat along the wall, so the grown-ups can do business. And by grown-ups he means the ones with dicks.

  “I guess I should count myself lucky he didn’t invite my moron cousin in this time. He does that, you know. I think he thinks that Kyle might learn something—by osmosis, maybe. As if—with all the brain cells Kyle has scorched. The only things that get through his thick skull lately are meth and vodka.” Another swallow and another bitter laugh. “Not that I’m judging.”

  I shook my head. “You’re seriously complaining to me about the glass ceiling at Bray Consolidated?”

  She made her small, manicured hand into a fist. “He bugged my fucking office!”

  “You sound shocked. Is it such a surprise that a guy with his own private army might take his management style from Dick Cheney? I thought you were smarter than that.”

  “I’m plenty smart, doctor—believe me. I’m the only one fucking smart enough to run that company for him. The only one with any kind of vision. The only one with balls.”

  “And yet he doesn’t trust you. So sad.”

  She crossed her bare legs, laughed bitterly, and took another drink. “I sense a certain lack of sympathy on your part, doctor, to say nothing of empathy. They didn’t cover this in med school—under the heading of bedside manner?”

  “I’m weeping for you on the inside.”

  Mandy took another drink and flipped me the bird. “Once upon a time he used to say I was the son he never had. What a bunch of bullshit.”

  “He said that in front of Kyle? Because, if he did, it explains a lot.”

  “He used to say it when Kyle was in the hinterlands—over in Europe, trying to play good soldier. Cap was definitely not impressed with his efforts. He stopped saying it when Kyle came back, though.”

  I shook my head and swallowed some of my drink. “The son I never had—very nice. So what happened to make him pull the plug on us this afternoon? Did your uncle just suddenly recall that you don’t have a penis, or was it something else?”

  “Who knows? He probably thought I’d waited too long to start the waterboarding.”

  “I gather he’s not much for conversation. Personally, I thought we were doing okay, you and I.”

  She looked at me, patted my leg, and sighed. “We were doing just fine, doctor. We were having a pleasant chat about custody hearings, and you were threatening me with reporters, and then—boom—we were done. Maybe your reporter talk pissed him off. Maybe he thought I should’ve just clubbed you when you mentioned it—like a baby seal.”

  Strobing lights flashed past us—a prowl car running silent in a red-and-blue blur. I slid the window down, and warm air rushed in. I took a deep breath. “Maybe,” I said.

  Mandy yawned. “Put that up—it’s too windy.”

  I looked out at the streets. We were on Olympic, just east of the 110. “Where are we going, Mandy?”

  “West. The general direction of my place.”

  I laughed and took another drink. “I don’t think so.”

  Mandy laughed. “Because of Dr. Yoga MILF? Are you guys, like, going steady? ’Cause I’ll tell you, I sensed some tension last night. I think she was sort of pissed at you. Or maybe she’s always that way.”

  “A: don’t call her that. B: I really don’t know what she and I are doing, since she’s not taking my calls. And C: yes, she was definitely pissed, thanks to your cousin and you.”

  Mandy reached over and ran a fingertip around my earlobe. “So let me make it up to you,” she said softly. “I’m not as old as you apparently like, but I’m limber.”

 
; I batted her hand away. “Don’t you have a boyfriend or something?”

  She laughed and stretched her legs into my lap. Her bare soles were hot on my thigh. She held up her hand and made a show of inspecting her engagement boulder. “I have a fiancé, which I guess is close enough, but he’s in Shanghai right now. Anyway, he has nothing to do with us.”

  I smiled. “It’ll be an amazing marriage, I’m sure. But sleep would be the best thing for you right now, Mandy—”

  “We can sleep. Eventually.”

  “Sleep and lots of water. I don’t think you’re going to feel that great tomorrow.”

  Mandy sat up, slid across the leather, and ended up mostly in my lap. Her lips were soft on mine, and her tongue insistent. She tasted of Sazerac, and when she pulled away she left the same heat and vanishing coolness on my lips.

  She kissed my ear, and whispered: “There’s the blah, blah, blah coming out of your mouth, and there’s all the stuff going on inside. You’ve got to get your stories straight, doctor.”

  “Mandy—”

  “Too much talk,” she said, and she hitched up her skirt, swung a leg across me, and straddled my lap. Her mouth was hot pressing down, and her body was strong and lithe and burning. Her breathing was quick, her hips were achingly slow, and her spicy, whiskey scent was everywhere. I don’t know how long our fevered grapple lasted, but we were on Melrose, in West Hollywood, when I came up for air. My shirt was open and so was hers. Her bra was a pale web of lavender lace, half falling off.

  Mandy’s face was above me—pink and shining and swollen-mouthed. “Jesus,” she whispered, and bit my lower lip.

  “Indeed,” I said, and I hoisted her off my lap and back onto her own seat.

  “What the fuck?” she said, scowling.

  “I need to catch my breath, Mandy.”

  She laughed. “What—you want candy and flowers, or something? ’Cause, from what I could tell, you were DTF.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Down to fuck, Gramps, and don’t tell me that you weren’t—that you aren’t.”

  I fumbled with my shirt buttons. “Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I’d like to know who exactly you’d be fucking—me or your uncle?”

  Mandy straightened her skirt and looked down at her blouse, but didn’t bother to close it. “I could ask you the same, Dr. Freud, except that I couldn’t care less.”

  “Like I said, maybe it’s a generational thing.”

  Mandy sighed, found her glass, and took another drink. “I think you just like saying no to me, doctor. I think it turns you on a little bit.”

  “It’s possible you have that backward, Mandy. It’s called projecting, if I remember from my psych rotation.”

  She raised an eyebrow and smirked at me over her glass. “You may be on to something, Sigmund.” Then she flicked a switch on her armrest and spoke to the driver. “You can stop over by the Urth, Gus. The doctor will get out here.”

  The Mercedes pulled to the curb near the corner of Melrose and Westmount. “You’re dumping me here?”

  “No one rides for free, doc,” she said, chuckling, and pushed open the door with her foot. She was still laughing when the Mercedes rolled away.

  I took an Uber home, and along the way didn’t think of the heat of Mandy’s body, her lips, the dizzying scent of her, but wondered instead about her family—her uncle and her cousins.

  Mandy was wrong, I thought, about what had pissed her uncle off enough to send Conti barging into her office to collect me. It wasn’t my threat about reporters—we were right in the middle of that discussion when Conti appeared. And I doubted it was our back-and-forth about custody fights—that had taken place only a minute or two earlier. No, what had upset Harris Bray—and maybe what had driven him to war—was something Mandy and I had talked about before that. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was.

  When the car dropped me at the clinic, I didn’t go in, but went around back to the Dumpster, where my Honda was parked. I looked through the filthy window at the white garbage bag, still slumped on the rear seat. Then I got behind the wheel and started the engine. I dug out my phone before I shifted into drive, and put in a call to Jiffy-Lab.

  CHAPTER 46

  It was dawn when I said goodbye to Nate Rash and got in my car and pulled onto Third Street. I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, but my mind was oddly clear as I headed east, as if a stiff ocean breeze had swept away my shaky fatigue, thoughts of impending doom, and any other anxious cobwebs. The sky was pale and brightening ahead of me, and the streets as close to empty as they got. I stopped for an egg sandwich and a bucket of coffee at Bottega Louie, and rolled up to the clinic as Lucho was opening the doors.

  I ran my window down, and he walked to the curb. His green scrubs were pressed, but he was not. His skin was sallow, his broad face lined, and there were gray pouches beneath his eyes.

  “You’re early,” I said.

  “Not a lot of sleep goin’ on at our place. Artie was at the keyboard all night.”

  “He get anywhere?”

  Lucho shook his head. “He found footprints or something—I’m not sure what that is—but he said the fuckers who did this were good at it. They didn’t make it look like this porn crap was just being stored on his clients’ servers; they made it look like the servers were being used to exchange this shit. He still hasn’t found the actual files they put out there—he said that’ll take more time—and he’s still trying to put together some proof that he had nothing to do with any of this.”

  “Is he going to reach out to his clients—to explain things, and get ahead of this?”

  “We talked about it, but it’s not so easy to explain, right? Not without sounding like you’re a little crazy yourself. That’s why he wants evidence before he gets into it with them—something that’ll calm ’em down when they freak. He’s afraid some of ’em will call the cops no matter what.”

  “Artie could call the cops.”

  Lucho squinted at me for a while. “So could you,” he said finally.

  I nodded. “Has he thought about a lawyer?”

  Lucho rolled his eyes. “We talked about it, but…” Lucho rubbed his thumb over his first two fingers. “We were thinking about Anne Crane. Maybe she’d throw some pro bono our way.”

  I nodded, and cursed to myself for not having thought to call her. “I bet she would. I’ll phone her.”

  —

  Patients started showing up around six-thirty, by which time I’d left a message for Anne, showered and changed, and started coffee brewing in the file room. We were working on the second pot when Lydia appeared. She’d never been so late before, or looked so rumpled or distracted. She offered no explanation of her late arrival, or any word at all beyond asking me about the patients in the waiting room, and the ones I’d seen already. She didn’t look at me when she asked, or when I answered.

  I filled my coffee mug and took cover in an exam room, hiding behind a line of patients from thoughts of Lydia’s anger, Harris Bray’s promises, and other shoes dropping. The motley parade marched all day, and the caffeine flowed, and my sense of clarity somehow persisted. Until it shattered into a thousand pieces at around four-thirty that afternoon, when a messenger walked in. He had a clipboard, and sweat stains under the arms of his polyester shirt, and he brought me an eviction notice, which he made me sign for.

  CHAPTER 47

  “You should’ve called me, for chrissakes.” Anne Crane let the letter from my new landlord fall to her desk. “Right away—as soon as Bray turned you loose.” We were at Burnham Fiedler’s offices—mostly empty on a Saturday—in Anne’s gray, glass-walled box. Fading daylight came through the window and fell on a desk cluttered with dog-eared documents, cups from the Coffee Bean, an empty yogurt cup, and a half-eaten salad in a plastic container. Anne wore jeans and a rumpled pink blouse with an umlaut of raspberry jam on it. Her gray hair was pulled into a short, ineffective ponytail.

  �
�What would you have told me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know—but I would’ve had twenty-four more hours to think about it, maybe to figure out some things. If nothing else, we’d have had an extra day to find these people—Brickel and Goins—and remind them of the downside of making false accusations.”

  “Good luck with that. They don’t have addresses, or much of anything else besides the clothes on their backs. They’re litigation-proof, Anne, just like Bray.”

  “Harris Bray’s got plenty of assets.”

  “So? Bray’s insulated—even I know that. The real estate transactions are separated from him by who knows how many layers of companies, and I’m sure we could look for a long time without finding a link from Bray to what’s happened to Arthur and his clients, or to the charges against me and Lydia. His private army is good at that stuff. All these are going to look like discrete events, and I’m the only one to say differently. It’ll be my word against his that this is—what—a conspiracy? Coercion? Is there something you would have said to make that argument sound more plausible?”

  She picked up the eviction notice again and shook her head. “This is shit, you know. Your lease doesn’t permit—”

  “This is just a shot across the bow, Anne—the first one. And while you’re filing whatever you can file about this, Lucho and Artie are going to get their own eviction notice, and Lydia and I are going to hear from the licensing boards. Not to mention Artie’s clients. Speaking of which…”

  “I’m not sure what I can do for him. I—Burnham Fiedler—represent the clinic and maybe you personally, if we stretch things. We don’t represent your employees or your contractors.”

  “But you could, couldn’t you?”

  “And do what—assuming my masters let me do anything at all?”

  “I don’t know, help him calm his clients down, maybe. Help him if the cops come around.”

  “For that he’ll need a criminal lawyer. I don’t do—”

  “He’s a bystander, Anne—they all are. You guys must be able to do something.”

  Anne winced. “I’ll talk to my bosses. But the bigger question is: what are you going to do about all this? This is a world of shit, doctor. Have you thought about—”