The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” she said in little more than a whisper. “I haven’t told anyone. I can barely bear to face it myself: it’s my fault Becky died.”

  “Catherine, that’s ridiculous. Your daughter was murdered, by those two monsters. They kidnapped her....”

  “I could have stopped it,” she said in an agonized voice. “I should have stopped it. I should have been there, only....” She turned tear-brimmed eyes to him, “Only, I stopped to look at a magazine, one of those trashy gossip things. I stood there reading about some Hollywood bimbo for two, maybe three minutes. While they were dragging Becky from our car.”

  “There were two men. Armed men. Even if you had gotten there two minutes sooner, what could you have done?”

  She shook her head, her voice rising in near hysteria. “They wouldn’t have taken her if I had been there.”

  “You can’t know that, darling, they might just have shot you that much sooner. They might have killed you.”

  “You can die and go on living.”

  “Catherine, I beg you....”

  She turned away from him, her heart aching. How could she make him understand? She hardly understood it herself. Why had she even been given this gift? Gift? It was more of a curse, wasn’t it? Yet she had been given it: there is something only you can do....

  “It’s no use,” she said. “I understand how you feel....”

  “Do you?” he asked, and now there was an unmistakable note of bitterness in his voice. He was convinced she had no idea how he felt. Worse, he believed she did not because she did not want to. That, more than anything else, tore at him like a demon ripping his guts out of him. Nothing, no one, was as important to her now as Paterson. Second fiddle was not a happy instrument to play.

  “...But I can’t,” Catherine was still speaking, “I won’t give up now, not until I’ve seen it through. Don’t you see, Jack, those children, the ones he’s damaged already, and the ones he means to steal. I’m all they have.”

  “Can’t you see, you’re all I have?” he asked. “Catherine, you can’t bring Becky back to life.”

  For a long moment she stood frozen in place, clenching her teeth, her fists tight, trying to control the anger that flared up within her.

  “Damn it, Jack, that’s not fair,” she swore finally, and whirled to face him—but he had gone, the door closing softly in his wake.

  She stared at it, part of her wanting to run after him, to beg him to stay. She even, for a brief moment, wondered if he could be right, if she should give up her pursuit of Paterson and just run away, run so far that he couldn’t ever find her.

  There was no distance that great, however. In her heart, she knew that, and she knew, too, that she could never quit so long as he was still out there, still free to do evil. Sadly, she knew something else as well: she would never be able to make anyone, not even Jack, understand what this meant for her.

  She stared about at the dreary little cottage with its tawdry furnishings. She was alone. When you got down to it, she had always borne this burden alone, and always would.

  Oh, hell, she thought, that is too bleak. Tomorrow, the day after, she’d be ready to tackle things again. Ready to tackle Paterson somehow. Ready to patch things up with Jack. She knew that she had to do that. She couldn’t allow this quarrel to continue.

  But she still wouldn’t be able really to share. Talk about it, yes, but the burden remained hers alone.

  Well, then, somehow the means to do it must be shown to her as well, mustn’t it? And hadn’t the guidance she needed so often come to her in the past? She would just have to trust that it would again.

  She walked into the bedroom, threw herself across the bed, and began to cry.

  * * * *

  It was morning before she slept, and nearly noon by the time she woke, feeling scarcely rested, and utterly weary with living like a fugitive.

  And for what, she asked herself for the umpteenth time? Paterson was gone, in Mexico probably, a hundred miles and at least two hours away. She even took the chance of trying fleetingly to find him on the astral level and got only a dim image that told her clearly he was nowhere near.

  To make matters worse, she had picked up a bug, had woken nauseous and barely made it to the bathroom before she lost last night’s dinner. Or maybe it was the stress of her quarrel with Jack.

  In any case, it was one misery too many. She made up her mind that Paterson could not be allowed to steal her life from her by default. He might win after all in the end, but she was not going to give up everything for his sake.

  She called Jack at the station and was told he was in a meeting. “Would you like his voice mail?” his secretary asked.

  Catherine hesitated. Her feelings were such a muddle: frustration, anger with him for not understanding, anger and guilt with herself because at least a part of her suspected he was right. How could she say all that on his voice mail?

  “No, I’ll call him later,” she said instead.

  * * * *

  Chang waved her way past King’s secretary and entered his office without knocking. He looked up, surprised. In all the time they had worked together, this was a first. And they weren’t on the best of terms at the moment; since her unauthorized visit to Danny O’Dell, of which he had definitely not approved.

  “Colley, sir,” she said without preamble. “J. D. Colley. As in John David.”

  The King gave her a blank look and waited for explanation.

  “We picked up some prints at the Morning View house. Paterson’s. And his partner’s. J. D. Colley. He had a couple of priors for molestation, pled down, got off. That’s why he was hard to find. And the description matches.” She dropped a mug shot on his desk.

  “There’s more,” she said while he picked up the photos and looked hard at them. “We got some other prints, too. That actor’s. O’Dell.” She suppressed any temptation to say or even look I-told-you-so. “He lied to us when he said he didn’t know Paterson. Plus, we got a man from O’Dell’s television studio says there was an incident a while back, some kid said O’Dell came on to him in the john, tried to feel him up. It was all hushed up, big bucks shelled out probably, but the guy says he’s willing to swear to it, even has the name of the kid.”

  King nodded his head and started to scribble on a piece of paper. “It’s enough for a warrant. I want that house taken apart. If he’s got any shit there, we’ll nail him to the wall.” He glanced up at her and paused, and raised both eyebrows. “Chang, you look like a cat that just inherited a fish farm.”

  She allowed herself a grin. “Not a farm, sir, a cabin. O’Dell owns a cabin, out in the woods. At Big Bear.”

  King grinned back at her, a rare occurrence. He leaned back in his chair and made a tent of his fingers. “Does he now? Tell me one thing more, agent. Does he hang left or right?”

  “Right, sir. Definitely.”

  * * * *

  Despite everything, Catherine found that it astonishingly good just to be outside, in her car, moving with the traffic on the L.A. streets. It had rained early, but the rain had stopped and an erratic wind seemed determined to drive the remaining clouds away. Her spirits lifting, she promised herself that she would call Jack later in the afternoon and mend things with him. She meant to pick up the reins of her life again, instead of surrendering them to Paterson. What a fool she had been.

  She drove straight to the office in Century City. She wanted work, catharsis, a chance to stretch her mental muscles.

  She started with the mountain of mail that had accumulated in the few days she had been off. Bills, book proposals, letters. She sorted them into piles and, armed with letter opener, started with the financial stack. She had half opened a bank statement before she took a second look at the envelope and realized it wasn’t her bank.

  Fidelity Bank and Trust. It was another moment before she registered that this was the bank where Walter kept their joint account. She looked again at the address. Yes, it had b
een sent to the house and, both their names listed, Walter’s first. Somehow this had mistakenly been forwarded with her mail.

  She started to write “forward” on the envelope and then, remembering that it was half opened, decided instead she would drop it by the house. There were one or two things she had been meaning to pick up anyway.

  She had no more than set the envelope aside than her phone rang and to her surprise, it was Walter on the line.

  “What a coincidence,” she said, meaning to mention the statement to him, but he began to talk in a hurry, his voice anxious, stressed.

  “Catherine, I...I’m embarrassed to ask, but, I need some money. Some unexpected expenses at the restaurant. I wondered if....” He paused expectantly.

  “Of course,” she said, surprised. Walter had always been so meticulous in handling money, she could hardly imagine him running short. Finances had never been an issue between them, however. If anything, she supposed he had been overly generous with her. “How much do you need?”

  “Five thousand.” He blurted it out.

  The figure was another surprise. She expected him to say a few hundred. It left her briefly speechless.

  He misread the pause. “I can pay it back out of the money from the house,” he said quickly. “With interest. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t....”

  “No, no, that’s all right, interest won’t be necessary, and I’m not worried about your paying it back. It’s only, I don’t think I have that much in my account.”

  “Can you spare two?”

  She did a quick mental calculation. “Yes, I think I can. I’ll have to stop by the bank a little later. Did you want me to drop it off at the restaurant?”

  “I’ll come pick it up at your office. If that’s all right? And, Catherine, you are a peach, you don’t know how much I appreciate this.”

  “Don’t give it a thought,” she assured him. It was not until he had rung off that she realized that she had forgotten to mention the bank statement.

  Well, no matter, she thought, looking at it once again. He could pick that up with the cash.

  She was still staring at the envelope, puzzling at the strangeness of Walter’s behavior, when the phone rang again. This time it was a woman’s voice, one she didn’t recognize. “I’m calling from Fidelity Bank and Trust,” she said.

  Another coincidence? “Yes?”

  “There seems to be a slight problem with your account. It’s a bit overdrawn. We wondered if you could take care of that at your earliest convenience?”

  “You must mean the joint account that my husband and I keep,” Catherine said.

  “Yes. That would be the one.” She rattled off an account number. Catherine jotted it down. “It’s only a few hundred, you understand. But we do like to stay on top of these things.”

  For a long moment Catherine contemplated what she had just been told. It was even more incredible to her that Walter could have allowed a bank account to be overdrawn. “I don’t understand,” she said, more to herself than to the woman on the phone.

  “Well, there have been some rather large checks drawn on the account of late. Perhaps your husband wrote them, but you have seen the statement, I presume. Or if you haven’t, I could send you another copy, if you like.”

  The statement? “No, that won’t be necessary. I’ll....”

  “You really should review the charges,” the voice said, and then there was a change on the line and she was listening to a syrupy orchestral arrangement of Eric Clapton’s “Layla.” After a few seconds, the line changed again and a woman’s voice, a different voice, said, “This is Miss Frazier, thank you for holding. How may I help you?”

  “I was talking to someone else,” Catherine said, “Just a moment earlier. Another woman.”

  After a pause, Miss Frazier asked, “Do you recall her name?”

  “I...I don’t think she gave me one.”

  “I see.” Miss Frazier took a moment to consider. “Perhaps I can help you. What seems to be your problem?”

  “Our account appears to be overdrawn.” She gave Miss Frazier the account number she had jotted down.

  “Let me pull up that account.” Miss Frazier left her to listen to more of “Layla.” It was all legato strings, sweeping crescendos, muted rhythm. Only the melody was recognizable. She hoped for his sake Eric Clapton never heard it.

  Miss Frazier came back on the line. Catherine was not surprised when she said, “I don’t find anything wrong on that account. Are you sure of the number?”

  “Yes, that’s quite all right, never mind,” Catherine said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “Not at all. We at Fidelity Bank and Trust are always happy to serve our customers. Can I help you with anything else?”

  “No. Wait. Yes. Please do something about the music. It’s dreadful.”

  She hung up the phone and picked up the bank statement instead and considered. In all the years she had been married to Walter, she had never even glanced at one of these statements, had always left that account entirely up to him. She’d never had any reason to distrust him in that way. Now, contemplating looking at the statement, as that voice on the phone had advised her to do, she felt guilty, disloyal even, as though she were sticking her nose into Walter’s business.

  But, surely, it was what that disembodied voice wanted her to do, and who could that have been if not her intervening angel, once more prodding her to action. Anyway, the bank account was her business too, wasn’t it? They had both always made regular deposits to it throughout the years of their marriage.

  Her mother’s hints flashed into her mind, that Walter might have a drug problem. That, too, seemed incredible. Yet, it did happen to people, she knew that much, to ordinary decent people whose descent into drug addiction started with one, seemingly harmless step. Certainly he had been through a period of great stress—without, she had to add, having the great good fortune that she had in linking up with Jack.

  She snatched up her letter opener again and took a vicious stab at the flap on the envelope, fairly ripping it open, and took out the two precisely folded sheets within.

  Her own bank didn’t bother with checks at all anymore, only listed the check numbers and amounts, as she thought most banks did today, but Fidelity Bank and Trust still included both a listing of the amounts and, on a second sheet, photocopies of the checks themselves in miniature.

  She looked at the debit amounts first. For the most part, they were routine. Property taxes, electric bill, water bill, gas...and there, in the middle, three debits of nine thousand dollars each.

  Twenty-seven thousand dollars. She looked at the second sheet, at the reproductions of the checks. There they were, three checks written to the same payee: Harvard Beerman Health Clinic.

  Walter was ill, then, and had said nothing to her about it, perhaps thinking that she would have put off her decision to leave—as she would have, surely. You couldn’t walk out on a sick man, a sick husband, could you, not knowing that he was ill, not even if you were in love with another man?

  She must confront him on this, make him tell her what was wrong. It wasn’t the money that mattered. If he were ill, then she surely owed it to him, to their years of marriage, to contribute whatever she could to his care.

  Only—and with this thought came once more that nagging sense of doubt, of something else amiss—Walter had health insurance, excellent and almost total coverage. They both did. There was almost nothing their insurance did not cover.

  Drugs? Again that popped into her mind. Perhaps Walter did have a problem, and had already faced it, had already started rehabilitation. Did their insurance cover drug treatment? She couldn’t remember.

  She had never heard of the Harvard Beerman Health Clinic, but that of itself meant nothing. There were scores, maybe hundreds of private clinics throughout the city. What if this was some kind of a rehab center? Was rehab that expensive? She had no idea, really, but it certainly did sound like a lot of money.

&nbs
p; She looked in her desk drawers for a phone book, and was eyeing the shelves along the wall when Bill came in with some manuscripts.

  “Looking for something?” he asked.

  “A phone book. Would you find...no, wait. Here,” she wrote the name of the clinic on a piece of paper and handed it to him. “I’ve got to run to my bank. See if you can find out what this place is, what kind of clinic, I mean. If they do, well, any specialized kind of treatment, or just general medicine.”

  The bank was only a few blocks from her Century City office. She walked, hurrying against a chilling winter wind, worried thoughts blowing through her mind as she went.

  It didn’t matter that she didn’t love Walter in any romantic sense, or that they were no longer together. Clearly, there was some sort of trouble in his life, and she owed it to him to do what she could to help. The money was the least of it. If it were drugs, say, then she must convince him to get treatment if he hadn’t already.

  She cashed a check for two thousand dollars and hurried back to her office. Bill was there before she had finished hanging up her coat.

  “Harvard Beerman Health Clinic is not particularly forthcoming about their practice,” he said. “They wanted to know what kind of problem I had, and whether I had been referred to them by anyone. That seemed to matter a lot. I don’t think they take patients except by referral. But I did get you a phone number and an address.” He handed those to her. “Are you all right? I have a friend who’s a doctor, if you need one.”

  “No, that’s all right, thank you,” she said. She puzzled over the information when he had gone, and studied the address he had written down. Her Thomas’ map of Los Angeles confirmed what she had already guessed, that the address was in Compton. Compton was a ghetto neighborhood, notoriously dangerous. Drugs, gangs, rampant crime. Not the sort of address she would have expected Walter to visit. Certainly not where you would expect to find an expensive clinic.