The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  “She was here,” Bill said. “She left a couple of hours ago.”

  “Did she say anything about where she was going?”

  “Not really. She asked me to look up a clinic in Compton. The, let me think, The Harvard Beerman Clinic. She might have gone there.”

  Jack hung up the phone, more puzzled and worried than ever. Compton? Catherine’s doctor had offices in Century City, not far from where she worked. Why would she go to a clinic in Compton, of all places?

  Still—a medical problem. Maybe a different doctor? You couldn’t hold the location against someone. And no real evidence that she had gone there anyway, that might have been mere coincidence, or something to do with a book. More than likely, Catherine had given in to the frustration and boredom of being confined, and her unhappiness over their spat, and had simply gone out for a breather.

  That strange yellow light, like lightning, flickered again.

  He dialed Chang’s number.

  * * * *

  Sitting at a stoplight in Hollywood, Chang listened with a growing sense of unease to Jack’s worried explanation. She had been about to call both of them with her good news: O’Dell had completely caved when they had showed up with their warrant, had tearfully told them everything, had fingered Paterson as his supplier, both for drugs and for kid-porn.

  “He’s evil,” he blubbered while the uniforms bagged and cataloged his collection. “I should never have gotten mixed up with him.”

  Amen to that, Chang had thought, but she could find no sympathy in her heart for O’Dell. He had been an all too willing participant, as far as she could see. Without the collusion of people like him, the Patersons and his ilk would be out of business before they started.

  She had left Conners to book the actor and was on her way back to her office, to coordinate with the King for a warrant to enter the Big Bear cabin, when she got the call from Jack.

  Now, the news that Catherine had disappeared—into Compton?—took precedence over warrants. Paterson thought he was safe in Big Bear. He would stay on ice for a few more hours. Catherine AWOL was another matter. “She’s not at the safe house?” she asked.

  “She doesn’t answer the phone,” he said. “I haven’t actually been, yet.” He paused briefly. “We had a quarrel. A stupid one.”

  “Meet me there,” she said. The quarrel wasn’t any of her business; Catherine’s whereabouts were. The light had turned green and the driver behind her began to honk insistently.

  She gave him the bird and hung a right at the next corner, already punching numbers into her cell phone.

  “Shoot out at the O.K. Corral,” she said when Conners answered.

  * * * *

  Walter had no sooner ended his call with Catherine than his cell phone rang again. It was the voice he dreaded. He prayed each time that this would be the last, and knew in his heart that it would never end.

  “I’m on the freeway, heading into town,” Paterson said. In the background Walter could hear the roar of engines, horns honking, the whoosh of thousands of tires on pavement. “I need that five grand.”

  “I haven’t got that much, Trash.” He hated himself for the whine that crept into his voice. “Like I told you, I’m all tapped out. When the house gets sold, then I can....”

  “I can’t wait for no frigging house to sell, I need some money now. How much have you got?”

  “Two thousand. That’s all I could get. I’m broke, I tell you. And something else, Trash....” He hesitated, fearing the reaction he would get, but he forced himself to say it anyway. “I’ve been thinking about this long and hard. I’m giving it up.”

  Paterson’s voice was sharp. “What do you mean, giving it up? Giving what up?”

  “All of it.” Walter’s voice broke in a sob. One of the grill cooks glanced in his direction. Walter sniffled loudly and got himself under control. “I’ll give you the two thousand,” he said in a lowered voice, “and then I’m getting rid of all my stuff, I’m going to burn it. It’s sick, man. I’m sick. I can’t live with myself any more. I can’t live with what I’ve done. I’m going to burn everything, and then I’m turning myself in. To the police.”

  “The police? Are you fucking crazy? What about me? Hell, here I have been nothing but a friend to you all this time, anything you wanted, nothing was too good for you, and you’re talking about turning on me, turning me over to the cops? What kind of shit is that?”

  “Not you,” Walter insisted. “I won’t say a word about you or Colley, I swear it, I wouldn’t ever do that. I just...I got to do it, man, I’ve got to get this off my conscience. It’s killing me, I’m dying from inside.”

  “Look, first place, you can’t burn DVDs, they won’t melt.” He had no idea if that was true or not, but it sounded right, and anyway, Desmond was a dumb shit, he wouldn’t know any better. “Okay, so say you don’t want the stuff around any more, I’ll take it off your hands, you just hand it all over to me and it’s gone. Hell, I’ll even get you some of your money back. Not all of it, but some.”

  “I don’t care about the money.”

  “Well, you turn yourself in to the police, you’re going to need money for a lawyer, that’s for sure, lots of money. Look, where are you now?”

  “I’m at the restaurant, but I’m just getting ready to go home. I’m going to do it now, before I turn chicken.”

  “Okay, calm down, calm down, listen, I’ll meet you there, at your place. We’ll talk about all this. Don’t do anything till I get there, okay?” Walter hesitated. “Okay?” Paterson insisted.

  Walter ran the back of his hand across his runny nose. “Okay. And, Trash, I mean it, I’m not going to say anything to the cops about you, not a word.”

  Paterson ended the call. “You got that right, you dumb fuck,” he said. “Head for Desmond’s place,” he told Colley, “quick like a rabbit.” His mood was ferocious. Everything had gone wrong, and he knew exactly who was to blame. But he couldn’t have her husband screwing things up either. Going to the cops? What kind of shit was that?

  “What are you going to do, Trash?” Colley asked, automatically picking up speed.

  “What the hell do you think I’m going to do?” Paterson reached into the glove box and took out the .38, checking to make sure it was loaded. “He’s dead meat. And good riddance, far as I’m concerned.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Catherine called the house on her way, to see if by any chance Walter had left the restaurant after her call and come home. Even when she was there, when she had driven past the realtor’s For Sale sign and parked the car half in, half out of the garage, she called yet again on her cell phone. She could actually hear the kitchen phone ringing inside the house.

  She thought about calling Jack, or Chang. Certainly she would have been glad to have either of them with her, or both. She was no hero. Her heart turned to ice when she thought of what she was about to do, but it was simply something else she had to do herself. She had to know, had to be certain; but the suspicions clamoring inside her head were so horrible that she could not share them with anyone while there remained the slightest possibility that Walter was innocent of them. Once a man had been tarred with that sort of accusation he could never be entirely free of it.

  She owed him that much, at least. This might all be some sort of ghastly misunderstanding. Walter’s visits to the clinic might be entirely innocent. And Donna could have gotten things mixed up. She hadn’t appeared to be the swiftest boat in the water.

  If Walter had any connection with Paterson, he deserved whatever punishment he got, but she would give him the benefit of every doubt until she was sure, until she knew the truth.

  She felt a prickling at the back of her neck as she got out of the car. Paterson, somewhere close? She heard the sound of an approaching car and held her breath, but it went on by, splashing a street-side puddle of rainwater.

  She considered looking in on Paterson, to see where he was at the moment, but she was afraid to do so, afraid
of drawing him to her. The last thing she wanted was for him to find her here, even on the spirit level. She wanted no interruptions in what she had planned.

  She went in through the kitchen, leaving the garage door open so that if he should come home, Walter would know that she was here. Better to confront him than to have him call the police to report a burglary in progress. If everything she suspected was somehow a horrible mistake, she certainly did not want the police involved in it. Not even Chang. Not until she knew.

  She could understand why the house remained unsold, realty sign notwithstanding. It was a pig sty, dishes piled everywhere, half eaten food moldering on the table, wrappers and cans littering the floor. A sour, rotting smell permeated the air. She thought of the meticulous, neat man with whom she had lived for years. He had vanished, apparently, consumed by another self that must always have lurked within him.

  She tossed her jacket on a chair, hardly glancing at the disarray, and went directly to Walter’s office. Even living alone, he would probably not have abandoned his safe hiding place. That sort of habit did not die easily.

  The carpet on the floor of the closet was loose. She pulled it back, to reveal a trapdoor. The space below was crude, unfinished, just dust covered boards and wooden beams. Nestled in the gap between the beams was a small cardboard box.

  She lifted it out, dreading what she might find, and opened the flaps on top. A gun lay inside. She hadn’t known Walter even owned a gun. It was impossible for her to imagine him using it.

  Next to the gun was a small plastic bag half filled with white powder. Cocaine, she wondered? Speed? She was woefully ignorant about such things, but Chang would know. And, anyway, that wasn’t what she was looking for. Just for the moment she couldn’t have cared less about any drug problem of Walter’s. If there were anything that evidenced a link between him and Paterson, this was where it would be hidden. Right this instant, that was all she cared about.

  Beneath the plastic bag were a couple of DVDs, unlabeled, and a manila envelope. The envelope was filled with pictures. She slid them out and looked at the one on top.

  Her stomach gave a warning turn. She gasped aloud. Though she had never before seen anything like this, she knew exactly what she was looking at. Chang had called it “kiddie porn,” but that label was altogether misleading. It sounded too cute, too innocent, for the filth she held in her hands.

  Even “porn” didn’t seem right. Time and usage had made that word less wretched than it once was. She had even heard the expression “porn-chic,” an implication of something exciting, something sexually advanced, sophisticated.

  How, she wondered dazedly, could anyone find this sexually exciting? Yet it was self-evident that someone must. This clearly was the business that drove Paterson and Colley: producing just such horrors as these pictures and, she was sure without even looking at them, the videos as well. This was why they needed children, needed to steal them, because how else to recruit these poor, tortured innocents? She leafed through the photographs, having to force herself to look at them when her eyes wanted to slide away. Little girls, and little boys as well. No gender discrimination in this hell, she thought grimly.

  She groaned aloud and let the pictures fall from her hands. They fluttered to the floor like leaves from a dying tree.

  It was horrible enough to contemplate what Paterson and Colley had done, were still doing, would continue to do until she found a way to stop them. It was worse, infinitely worse, to know that their evil business could not exist were there not people willing to pay money for pictures such as these.

  People like Walter. She could not pretend about that. These pictures hadn’t simply fallen into his hands. Even if they had come to him through some freak set of circumstances, a normal person, a sane person, would immediately turn them over to the police, would be as sickened and shamed by them as she was. That Walter had kept them, kept them hidden away here in this little cache, told her everything.

  She had lived with a stranger for years, shared his home, his bed, borne a child to him, and here, for the first time, she was seeing who he really was. A part of her hated not only him, but herself as well for being such a fool, for unwittingly providing him with a cover of innocence that had allowed him to practice his vice undetected, even unsuspected.

  With that thought came another, the most terrifying of all. She snatched up the pictures, riffling through them hastily. She could not bear to think that Becky might be in any of these photos, and at the same time couldn’t bear not to know.

  That little girl, with blonde hair, her face hidden, could that be her? She stared, horrified, at the image, but she could not say. She went through the pictures again, but there was no one of whom she could be certain. In all but the rarest few, the faces were hidden. They were only bodies, these tiny victims, just flesh to be violated.

  She hurled the photos away from her. With a loud sob, she buried her face in her hands. It seemed to her as if she could hear the cries of all those tortured children, their voices clamoring for help, for comfort, for justice.

  “Catherine?” Walter said from outside the room. He appeared in the door and saw her kneeling by the closet, his eyes taking in the exposed cubbyhole, the cardboard box, the photos strewn on the floor. “Oh, hell,” he said.

  “Yes, Walter, hell.” She got slowly to her feet, hardly noticing that her legs had gone stiff from kneeling on the hard floor. “That is exactly what I am looking at, at a window into hell.”

  He stood motionless, hands hanging helplessly at his sides, and began to cry, quietly, tears rolling down his cheeks. “I wanted to tell you.” His voice was little more than a whisper, but so sharpened were her senses that she heard him as clearly as if he were shouting. “For so long, I wanted to, but I couldn’t. How could I?”

  “How, indeed? How could one explain anything like this?” She leaned down to snatch up a handful of the photographs, “To any sane person? What? Why? How?”

  “It was drugs. Cocaine.” He paused for her to say something.

  “Go on,” she said in an icy voice. “I want you to make me understand what could have brought you to this. How could cocaine, how could any drug, result in these pictures?”

  “You remember, three years ago,” he said, speaking in an earnest voice as if he truly wanted to make it clear to her, “when I started up the restaurant, I was working such long hours, night and day it seemed, and one of the cooks offered me some cocaine. Have you ever...?”

  She shook her head and said nothing.

  “Well, it’s hard to describe exactly, it picks you up, like a super tonic, everything goes faster. And at first it helped, I couldn’t believe how well, it gave me the energy I needed, it seemed like I could go on forever.

  “It was just a little each time to start, a couple of lines, once, maybe twice an evening. After a while, though, I needed more to do the job, and more still. And finally the cook said it would be cheaper and simpler if I got it myself, and he hitched me up with a supplier. I started getting it by the ounce, it was cheaper, like he’d said, and I had all I needed all the time. The dealer was there for me whenever I needed him.”

  “Paterson,” she said, her voice even, emotionless.

  He blinked, surprised that she knew the name. “Yes, Paterson. Trash Can, they call him. How do you...?” But her look stopped his question. He hesitated but when she said nothing, he went on. “Well, that worked for a while, I’d buy it from him, and sometimes we’d do it together, at his place, and listen to music and talk. He seemed like such a great guy, he made me feel, I don’t know, smart, important, special. Our marriage wasn’t, you know, things had long since died out for us.”

  “Don’t, Walter,” she said coldly. “Don’t suggest for a moment that I am to blame, that our marriage led to this. Yes, I know that I was not a model wife. It was a rotten marriage, I will grant you that, but millions of people survive rotten marriages without turning into monsters.”

  He gulped and shook his head
. “No, no, it wasn’t our marriage, it wasn’t you. I know that. Paterson is to blame, he’s the one who....” His voice broke. He swallowed hard. “Well, one night he told me someone owed him for a bunch of drugs and didn’t have the money, so they paid him off with a collection of pornography, and that some of it was pretty weird. He played on my curiosity until I insisted I see it for myself. I was high. You think funny when you’re on the stuff.

  “Anyway, there was a lot of the usual sort of thing. It was okay, some of it was pretty good, but I couldn’t see what he meant about weird. Then he showed me this one movie...it’s there, in the hole. It...it disgusted me, Catherine, honestly, it did. But, God forgive me, it excited me too. I couldn’t help it. I got turned on watching it. I know it’s sick, but we can’t help how we are made, can we? I didn’t want to respond to it, but I did, despite myself.”

  He paused reflectively. “What I can’t understand, what I have asked myself so many times after, was how did he know? How could he have guessed that movie would turn me on like it did?”

  “I should have thought the answer to that would have been obvious, Walter. Water, even filthy water, rises to its own level, doesn’t it? Tell me one thing,” she came a step toward him and brandished the stack of photographs, “Tell me Becky isn’t in these pictures.”

  He began to sob then, softly at first and then louder, his tears streaming unchecked, his nose running. “I couldn’t help it,” he said between choking sobs, “They blackmailed me. There were pictures of me with this little girl. I was in some of them. I swear to God I didn’t even remember them being taken, I don’t know when or how it happened, but it was me, you could recognize me right off. I must have been totally wasted. Anyway, they showed me these pictures, they threatened me with them, if I didn’t...they made me...that day....”