The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  On the spur of the moment, she called Fermin to tell him she was taking the rest of the day off. She put the two thousand dollars for Walter into an envelope and sealed it, wrote his name on the front, and left it with Bill.

  “My husband will be stopping by,” she said, “See that he gets this.”

  The bank statement she put in the drawer of her desk. There would be time enough to forward that to him later. She picked up the phone, intending to call Jack, and hesitated. He would try to talk her out of what she planned to do. They would surely quarrel again.

  She put the receiver back on its cradle, donned her coat again, changed from heels to walking shoes, and took the elevator to the garage.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Paterson had grown restless, not used to living cooped up with only Colley’s company. A good enough partner in his way, he mostly did as he was told and he could be surprisingly inventive when the situation called for it. Still, having him underfoot full time could get old quickly.

  Most especially, he was not used to going for long without sexual relief. And certainly Colley was no help there. Sooner fuck one of those wild burros that had wandered by in a pack the day before, was how he felt.

  His thoughts kept circling back to her: the bitch. He wanted her dead, he wouldn’t rest till he had managed that, but not until he had heard her beg. Beg for his cock, like they all did, before he finished screwing her. After that, she would beg for death. When he finally killed her, he would be doing her a favor. He wanted that so bad he could taste it.

  Even those daydreams didn’t satisfy him today, though. The cabin, primitive and not very big to begin with, got smaller by the hour. Christ, couldn’t that television fag afford something better? He had called it his “little shack in the country,” and Paterson had just supposed he was being cute, but shit, this really was a shack. The best you could say for it was that it was a long ways from anywhere. Or anybody. No other houses along this road, nothing more than a dirt track, and that ended a short distance beyond O’Dell’s shack, just petered out at a steep, wooded hillside that attracted not even the more adventurous hikers. Since they had been here he hadn’t heard or seen a trace of anybody except for the distant buzz of a chainsaw somewhere beyond the hill behind them, someone cutting firewood, and that had sounded at least a couple of miles away.

  Today, there was not even that to break the silence, only a tuneless humming from Colley while he fiddle-farted around in the kitchen space, not really a separate room, just some counters along one wall with a stove and a fridge, and some cupboards overhead. Outside a woodpecker drilled at a tree and the wind made ghostly noises in the pines. Shit. It was like being in prison.

  Besides, something was gnawing at Paterson. Something to do with her, only he didn’t know what, couldn’t put his finger on it. He had been wet-your-pants happy that time he had popped in on her, just the way she had with him. Scared the shit out of her, he could see that, and once again, he was the one in control.

  Only, he didn’t know how he had done it. It was like, he was thinking about her, thinking hard, and all of a sudden, there he was. He had tried since, though, had given himself a headache thinking about her, and gotten nothing for his trouble. A couple of times he almost thought he could see her, in a distance, like she was out there in a deep fog, but he couldn’t reach her.

  He gave a snort of disgust and jumped up from the sofa where he was sitting, watching a grainy image on the little black and white television. One lousy channel, was all that the rooftop antenna brought in, and half the time you couldn’t even watch that it was so bad.

  “Get your coat,” he said, “Let’s go for a ride.”

  Colley stopped his humming—that was something to be thankful for—and glanced at the pale light struggling through the closed curtains over the windows. “Now?” he asked.

  “No, I thought we’d put on our coats and sit in the van for an hour or two before we went anywhere. Course I mean now, you dumb ass.”

  “It’s still daylight, Trash. Suppose someone sees us?”

  “Who, one of those wild donkeys? They was the last ones to mosey by? Besides, the sun’s mostly down. By the time we hit L.A., it’ll be dark.”

  “L.A.? We’re going into L.A.?”

  “We got to get the rest of our money, I don’t mean to leave that asshole off the hook.”

  “Sure, but ain’t it dangerous....” Colley started to argue.

  “Anyone tries to look too close, I’ll slide down in the seat. It’s my face plastered on T.V. No one’s looking for you, are they? Let’s go. You drive.”

  It was snowing lightly. “If it gets snowing hard we might not be able to get back,” Colley said.

  “Snow’s barely falling,” Paterson said. “If it looks like it’s going to turn nasty, we can come back, can’t we?”

  * * * *

  At one time Compton had been an upper middle class bedroom community for Los Angeles proper, a California stew of architecture: Victorians, Spanish bungalows, ranch, saltboxes. A tide of immigrants had built for themselves imitations of the homes they had left behind.

  That had been several decades ago. In the intervening years the once proud-looking bungalows and ranches had mostly disappeared or morphed into gas stations, thrift stores, groceries. The Victorians and the saltboxes were apartment buildings and boarding houses, with graffiti-stained storefronts at the street level. More than a few of them were boarded up and empty.

  Her Jaguar was decidedly conspicuous in the Hood. Knots of idlers on street corners smoked and watched with undisguised curiosity as she drove by.. A wino slept in a doorway and a ragged looking creature of indeterminate sex pushed a heavily laden shopping cart.

  Even here, however, not everything was utterly bleak. The occasional Christmas lights sparkled valiantly in windows, too, and she passed a middle-aged woman bustling her young daughter home from holiday shopping, arms filled with packages. Surprisingly, here and there was the evidence of someone’s attempts at gentrification: a flower shop, a bookstore. A café that appeared altogether new and wouldn’t have looked out of place in West L.A. sat incongruously three doors down from an adult video store.

  She nearly missed The Harvard Beerman Medical Clinic. It sat behind stone walls and a heavy wire gate that presumably closed at night, already approaching. She was surprised by how quickly it fell now, as if she had never experienced a December evening before. The sky was a child’s finger painting, smudges of color streaked among sooty clouds.

  The clinic itself was a one-story stucco, faded pink, with glass brick windows. The ghosts of graffiti had bled through the thin coating of paint that had been daubed over it. Some straggly bushes lined the front on either side of an entrance door and a conspicuously unswept parking lot ran along one side, ending at an alley. A black cat, scrawny and wary, slipped around the corner of the building and disappeared into the bushes.

  A gray Honda Civic and a big black Mercedes Sedan, altogether too conspicuous for Compton, sat side by side at the nearer end of the parking lot, and at the far end, like a social outcast, was a dirty white Toyota.

  She parked in the middle. If anyone came shopping for wheels they would hopefully find one of the other cars more attractive than her Jaguar.

  She entered a waiting room that belied the expensive treatment that Walter must have gotten here: the sooty walls badly needed a fresh coat of paint. A chipped plastic table strewn with tattered and outdated magazines sat between a pair of sagging chairs and the floor was covered with well-worn linoleum.

  A buzzer rang as she came in and a frosted glass panel slid open in the wall facing the door. A receptionist in a pink uniform looked her over quickly and thoroughly, and a young woman standing behind her paused in her filing to stare in undisguised curiosity. Walk-ins were apparently not common here.

  “Yes?” The woman in pink asked. The monosyllable was carefully neutral. A placard on the desk identified her as Miss Griff.

  “I’d like
to see the doctor,” Catherine said.

  “Are you a patient?” The tone said clearly that Miss Griff did not think so.

  “No,” Catherine said, and before she could explain further, the receptionist said, “We aren’t taking any new patients,” and started to slide the glass panel shut.

  “Wait.” Catherine put a hand on the pane to stop it. “I wanted to talk about my husband. He is a patient, I believe.”

  “Name?”

  “Desmond. Walter Desmond.”

  She saw something register in the woman’s eyes before she gave her head an emphatic shake and said, “Sorry, we don’t have a patient by that name.”

  “Desmond,” the girl at the file cabinet said, “Wasn’t that...?”

  “We don’t have a patient by that name,” the receptionist repeated firmly. She snatched up some papers from her desk and thrust them at the girl. “Donna, give these to Doctor Beerman. And then you can take your dinner break.” This time the glass panel shut fully and firmly.

  * * * *

  Sitting in the parking lot, twilight settling around the car like a fog, Catherine tried to make sense of what had just taken place. She understood that doctors needed to be concerned about patient confidentiality, but this seemed to have gone far beyond that. She was certain the receptionist had lied. There had been that flicker of recognition before she insisted that Walter was not a patient. And surely the filing clerk, Donna, had started to say something entirely different.

  As if Catherine’s thoughts had conjured her up, Donna came out a side door in the clinic and hurried head down to the Toyota at the far end of the lot. The light mounted high on one clinic wall cast a feeble glow in a small orange circle just outside the door and left the rest of the lot in growing darkness. Donna did not seem even to notice the Jaguar parked forty feet away. A moment later the Toyota’s engine sputtered, coughed a time or two, and finally caught. Donna backed the car out of its space, turned, and drove into the alley.

  Catherine started the Jaguar and followed her, down the alley and out onto a busy street. Evening traffic was thick and she wondered if she would be able to keep the Toyota in sight, but fortunately the drive was a short one. Three blocks away, Donna turned into the parking lot of El Palacio, an anything but palatial looking Mexican restaurant.

  Catherine parked a few spaces away from her. She waited for Donna to go inside, gave her time enough to order. The lot was mostly empty. A homeless man dumpster-diving at the far end remained oblivious to her presence. She opened her purse and counted out five twenty dollar bills, folded them into a neat little rectangle, and thrust that into her pocket where she could reach it quickly and easily. She was careful to lock her car’s door and gave the badly lighted lot a quick look around. The dumpster-diver still hadn’t noticed her. Or didn’t care. When you were hungry enough nothing else mattered. She walked briskly past steam-frosted windows to the entrance and went in.

  The small dining room was damp and overheated, with a smell of old grease and exuberant spices. A long window opened to a kitchen where several women sweated and worked energetically, hardly paying any attention to her entrance. A jeans-clad waitress with ketchup-colored antlers on her head looked her over and made a motion with her hands that Catherine took to mean, sit anywhere.

  Donna was at a small table along one wall, reading a paperback novel and sipping a beer. Catherine took a breath and approached her quickly. She had slipped into the chair opposite before Donna even noticed her.

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” Catherine said. “But, I wonder if you could spare me a minute?”

  Donna gaped, startled. Her round face with its Cupid’s bow mouth might have looked cherubic, if cherubs had spots and hard looking, too-narrow eyes that blinked when they saw her and then narrowed still further.

  “You’re that woman, like, at the clinic,” she said.

  “Yes and I...I do apologize for sneaking up on you like this, it’s just...well, it’s very important.”

  Donna clamped her mouth shut and closed her paperback novel. “Excuse me,” she said and started to get up, chair scraping.

  “No, wait, please.” Catherine put a hand over the one with the book. “I won’t take but a moment, I promise. And I would be ever so grateful if you would just talk to me.” With her other hand, she took the twenties out of her pocket and laid them atop the table, her fingers not quite covering them. Donna’s eyes flicked to the money and stayed there. She sat back down and took another sip of her beer. It left a faint ring of foam around her mouth. She licked it off.

  The waitress approached and set a plate of chicken with rice in front of Donna, her eyes briefly registering the money under Catherine’s fingers. “Anything else?” she asked, eyes sliding from Donna’s face to Catherine’s and back to the money. The felt antlers drooped and bobbed.

  “Just coffee for me,” Catherine said. Donna shook her head. At least, Catherine thought, I’ve got her attention. She waited until the waitress left before continuing.

  “It’s just that,” she said, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial level, “well, I thought that the other woman back there at the clinic, the nurse....”

  “Miss Griff? She’s a bitch.” Donna’s eyes remained glued to the money on the table. “And she’s not a nurse either, not a real one.”

  Catherine smiled faintly and nudged the bills a little further across the table with the tips of her fingers. “I’m sure she had her reasons for shunting me off. Her orders, probably. But I’m just so worried, about my husband, I mean. I’m afraid he’s seriously ill, and he won’t talk to me about it. I thought if I could talk to his doctor, but, well....” She let her voice trail off.

  “It isn’t like that,” Donna said. “Your husband wasn’t even, like, the patient. He just came in with his brother, it was his brother that was the patient. But it was, you know, your husband who paid for him.”

  “His brother?”

  “Mike Something. He was like his half brother, I think, anyway, I remember they didn’t have the same last name. They didn’t look alike, either. But, you know, half brothers don’t, do they?” She shrugged and pulled her eyes up at last to Catherine’s face. As if of their own accord, her hand with its chewed nails rested on the table top, moved slightly in the direction of the bundle of twenties.

  Walter had no brother, half or otherwise. They had often talked of the fact that they had both been only children.

  “And was he, this brother, was he very ill?” she asked.

  A shake of the head. “Not at all. It was, you know, he had some work done. Like, cosmetic work, that’s what they do there, the doctors at the clinic. Mostly cheap boob jobs, collagen, nose jobs. They fixed his nose, I remember. Not, like, a nose job, I mean, not a regular nose job. Just, when he came in it was all bent to the side, you know, like it had been broken or something. And they took a mole off his chin. I don’t know exactly what all, I wasn’t...are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Catherine managed to say and fought the dizziness that had swept over her, making the room tilt and sway. The background noise of the restaurant, the voices from the kitchen, the clatter of pans and china, faded into a distant murmur.

  “’Cause you looked like you were about to pass out. Look, let me get you some water or something.” Donna started to get up again and, remembering, paused to snatch up the money and shove it into a pocket of her jacket.

  Catherine got to her feet, almost colliding with the waitress bringing her coffee. “No, thank you, I have to go.” She tossed a couple of ones on the table for the coffee, and added, for Donna’s benefit, “and thank you, thank you so much for talking to me.”

  She walked quickly away, out of the restaurant, heart pounding.

  The waitress stared after her. “What was that all about?” she asked.

  Donna took the money from her pocket and unfolded it. Five of them. A hundred bucks. Not bad. She shrugged and said, “Some society bitch slumming, who knows.”

  *
* * *

  In her car Catherine sat and stared into the darkness. Walter and Paterson? It wasn’t possible, surely? The man who had kidnapped his daughter? She couldn’t believe it.

  Was there some other connection? She thought of Walter hiding something in that space under the floor in his office. Once again, drugs came into her mind. Maybe the answer was there.

  At the first stoplight, she called Walter on his cell phone and, when he answered, asked if he had gotten the money she had left for him.

  “Yes, Catherine, thank you so much, I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

  “I’m glad I could help. Sorry I missed you, but something came up.” There were kitchen noises in the background, telling her he was at the restaurant. That was her real reason for phoning him, and no need now to ask. The house was empty. That was what she wanted to know.

  She caught the Santa Monica Freeway west, glad to be out of Compton, took Westwood Boulevard off the freeway and drove north: toward the house that she had shared for so many years with Walter. The house where, she hoped, her questions would be answered.

  * * * *

  Something was wrong. From the moment he had stepped into his office after his meeting, from the moment the lights seemed to flicker, casting an eerie yellow glow briefly over the room, alarms bells had gone off in Jack’s mind.

  His first thought was of Catherine. He had agonized the remainder of the night over their quarrel, desperately trying to find some middle ground that they could settle in, and finding himself inevitably back at the same stalemate.

  He had started to call her before leaving for work, and put it off. He told himself that it was consideration for the fact that she might be sleeping in, but it was sheer cowardice. He was afraid she might not want to talk to him, might never want to talk to him again. Cowardice and frustration, because he still had no argument that would convince her to give up her pursuit of Trash Can Paterson. He put the call off, hoping that some inspiration would come to him.

  Now, however, the warning bells were too loud to ignore. He called the number at the safe house, but there was no answer. He listened in mounting frustration as the phone rang again and again. On a hunch, he called her apartment. Nothing. He hung up and checked his voice mail. Nothing there either. He tried her office, and when she wasn’t in, asked to talk to Bill.