by Stuart Woods
“Who would have thought to look for me at all?” Wolf said. “After all, I’m supposed to be on a slab somewhere.” He winced at the thought. “Mark, where is Julia?”
“At the county morgue, with Jack and…whoever. The body won’t be released until a postmortem has been conducted—another day or two, I should think.” He paused. “Wolf, you said you read the Times; did you read the obituaries, too?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know about Julia’s…background.”
“Yes. How the hell did they find out about that? I never knew about it. Why would they put a thing like that in an obituary, for Christ’s sake?”
“I called a friend at the Times and checked that out,” Mark replied. “A Times reporter had interviewed Julia’s sister in prison a couple of times. She was apparently trying to interest him in a book about her case. She told him about Julia’s background when he called to tell her about the murders.”
“Mark, you were her analyst. Did you know anything about that?”
Pain crossed Mark’s face. “Yes. After a long time had passed. I sensed she was holding something back, and finally she came out with it.”
“The Times stuff was true, then?”
“All of it, I’m afraid. I hope you understand why I couldn’t tell you, Wolf.”
“Sure, doctor-patient confidentiality, and all that.”
“Exactly. Julia would never have told me anything if she’d had the slightest notion that I might tell you. I was in something of a quandary about it, but I decided to go by the book.”
“Of course.” Wolf remembered something. “Mark, the Times said something about your having been arrested in New York for practicing medicine without a license.”
Mark sighed deeply. “It was accurate, as far as it went. When I was in medical school at Columbia, I got a girl pregnant. We were at a lake house upstate for the weekend—I didn’t know about her condition—when she miscarried. Our friends were out shopping in the car, and there was no phone. I helped her as best I could, then sedated her and made her comfortable. The other girl in the group, when she returned to the house, thought I’d performed an abortion, and turned me in. When the girl recovered enough to talk to the police, it was all cleared up, but charges had been filed in the meantime. The incident has haunted my medical career.”
“I see,” Wolf said. “I knew it had to be something like that; I knew you couldn’t have done anything unethical.”
“I appreciate that, Wolf,” Mark said.
“Mark,” Wolf said, “I want you to hypnotize me.” Mark had hypnotized him half a dozen times a couple of years before, to help him stop smoking; he had been a good subject.
Mark looked down into his drink. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Wolf.”
“Mark, I’ve lost a whole day; I want it back. I’ve got to know what happened.”
“Wolf, if your mind refuses to remember, it’s for a reason. It’s likely that you’ve suffered a trauma that you couldn’t handle. It’s a protective function of the mind, like a circuit breaker that cuts out when there’s an electrical overload.”
“I understand that. I still want to know. Maybe I…was a witness.”
“If you couldn’t handle it then, what makes you think you can handle it now? You could end up catatonic.”
“I’m willing to take that chance. I can’t stand not knowing.”
“You have to understand, hypnotizing you now could put me in a very dangerous situation, legally speaking—dangerous for you, I mean. There are limits to doctor-patient confidentiality, and if I were subpoenaed—”
“I won’t ask you to lie for me, Mark, but I can’t go on living without knowing what happened that night.”
Mark’s shoulders sagged. “You’re my friend, Wolf. I’ll help you if I can.”
When Wolf woke, Mark was gone from the room. He sat up on the leather couch and rubbed his face with his hands. He felt a little light-headed, but well rested; his exhaustion had left him. He looked at his watch: two A.M. He had been out for over two hours.
Mark entered the office with a tray of food. Right behind him came Flaps. There was the usual two minutes of pandemonium that constituted any reunion with the dog.
“I’m glad to see you, girl,” Wolf whispered into her soft ear. She grinned for him.
“Maria was going to take her, but I thought she’d be happier here with some land to romp on.”
“Thanks, Mark, I really appreciate that.”
Mark handed him a large glass of fresh orange juice. “I had difficulty waking you, so I just let you sleep it off naturally.”
“Does that happen often with subjects?”
“It’s not rare; it’s not common, either. You needed the rest, I think, and your unconscious knew that.”
“I still don’t remember anything. What did I say when I was under?”
“Wolf, you have to understand that what you said isn’t necessarily what happened.”
“I did it, didn’t I?” Wolf sank onto the sofa again.
Mark raised a finger. “The mind is strange, Wolf. You’ve obviously been worrying about this since you read the story in the Times, and your mind may have…altered events, in order to expiate the guilt you were feeling—a kind of self-confession, if you see what I mean.”
“So this was inconclusive?”
“Yes, I think so. Otherwise, I’d be in the position of having to wonder whether I should call the police.”
“Why don’t I remember what I said when I was under?”
“I instructed you not to. It would have done no earthly good for you to remember, and it may have done you a great deal of harm. You are fortunate, I think, that this hypnosis was not administered by a court-appointed psychiatrist, who might not have been quite so well acquainted with the nuances. Incidentally, should it come to that, I’d advise you not to submit. I should think your best chance in this would be to remain mute at your trial.”
“My trial?”
“Assuming it comes to that, of course,” Mark said, looking away.
Suddenly Wolf was ravenous. He tore into the scrambled eggs and ham that Mark had brought him. When he had finished, he sat back and looked at Mark, who had been regarding him quietly. “What am I going to do, Mark?”
Mark sighed. “I think your choices are very limited,” he said sadly.
“You think I should turn myself in?”
“Only after talking to the best possible criminal lawyer,” Mark said, raising a warning finger. “Locally, that would be Ed Eagle.”
“The Indian guy?”
“He’s thought to be among the best in the country. Ed plays by what he calls Santa Fe Rules, and it works for him and for his clients. I know him, and I’d be glad to call him for you.”
“What are my other choices?”
Mark looked away.
“Run, huh?”
Mark looked back at him. “There’s always Mexico. Nobody’s looking for you; it’s thought you’re dead.”
“A new life south of the border,” Wolf mused. “I wonder what demand there is for entertainment lawyers in Puerto Vallarta?”
“Not much, I should think. Wolf, I think you should see Ed Eagle, but it’s your choice; if you want to leave, even if only for a while, I’ll help you in any way I can. I’ve got about thirty thousand in the bank, and if you need more, there are some bearer bonds in my safety deposit box—about two hundred thousand, I think.”
“Thanks, Mark, but I’m okay for money at the moment.”
“I wouldn’t cash any checks, if I were you, or use your credit cards.”
Wolf looked at the psychiatrist closely. “You’re assuming I’m going to run.”
Mark smiled. “You always had a fear of authority. That’s why you chose your career as an independent producer—so you could be as free as possible from the talent agencies and the studios. Frankly, I can’t see you placing your trust in the criminal justice system.” His smile faded. “I wish you
would, though.”
“You know me well, Mark.”
“I should, after two years of deep analysis, don’t you think?”
“And you’re a good friend, too.”
Mark shrugged. “A psychiatrist isn’t often called upon to be a friend. Lots of other things, but not a friend. To tell you the truth, there are some psychic rewards for me in helping a friend in trouble, so maybe I’m just being selfish.” He rearranged himself in the chair and slipped back into his role as analyst. “Wolf, there was something that came up in your analysis that you wouldn’t talk about at the time. I didn’t want to ask you about it under hypnosis.”
“What was that?” Wolf asked, knowing the answer.
“There was another time when you lost a day from your life.”
Wolf looked into the fire. “A day and a half,” he said.
“At the time of your first wife’s death?”
Wolf looked up at him. “How did you know that?”
“It was obvious. I didn’t want to press you at the time, but I will now. I think it’s important.”
“You mean you think that blackout and this more recent one may be related?”
“It’s possible. If they are related, we should know. Start at the beginning.”
Wolf looked back into the glowing embers. “All right,” he said.
CHAPTER
6
The fear came back. The dread that he had fought for so many years crept out of its banishment and seized him again. He did not try to fight it.
“Her name was Maggie. She worked for a casting agent Jack and I used, and she and I were in a lot of readings together. I was impressed with her judgment of actors, and she was extremely attractive, too. We began seeing a lot of each other.” He paused.
“Go on,” Mark said gently.
“I was just trying to remember how long we saw each other before…Oh, I guess it was seven or eight months, and after that long she was spending so much time at my apartment—I had a condo in Beverly Hills at the time—that we were practically living together. Pretty soon, I asked her to give up her place. We had talked about marriage, and agreed that neither of us had any business getting married. She thought that I was a workaholic, and I knew she didn’t want to give up her career—she wanted her own casting agency.” He shook his head. “She would have had it, too.”
“What happened to stop her?”
“She got pregnant.”
“And what was your reaction to that?”
“Panic. No other word for it. When she told me, I had this flash forward of the next twenty years, and I didn’t like it.”
“What didn’t you like about it?”
“The confinement; the obligation to somebody other than myself.”
“That’s honest. What about the obligations you had to Maggie already?”
“Those either of us could end at any time; it was the sort of arrangement we had.”
“Until she got pregnant.”
“Yes. Then everything changed. I couldn’t just say, ‘Thanks, that’s it, see you around the casting sessions.”
“Responsibility.”
“Yes. But you know I never shied away from responsibility; I craved it.”
“But only to yourself. That’s what you craved. We worked all this out long ago, remember?”
“Sure, I remember.”
“Did you ask her to have an abortion?”
“Not in so many words. I think I was as afraid of doing that as I was afraid of having a child. She brought it up. ‘That’s what you want me to do, isn’t it? Kill him?’ She already had it in her mind that it was a boy.”
“How did you make your decision?”
“She put it to me bluntly; she said she loved me, and she wanted us to be married and raise the child, and have others. But, she said, if I didn’t want that, too, then it was over—she would have the child and raise it on her own, and I would never see either of them again.”
“How did you feel about the prospect of not seeing her again?”
“The thought of not seeing her nearly killed me; I couldn’t stand it. That surprised me; I guess you never really know how you feel about a woman until you face the prospect of los-ing her.”
“So how did you deal with the problem?”
“I made my decision. I told her that I loved her, and I wanted to marry her, and I wanted the baby, and we would send him to Princeton, and he’d make us proud of him.”
“And was all that true?”
“Not all of it. I loved her, God knows, but I didn’t want a child. I was that selfish.”
“But you made the sacrifice to keep her?”
“Yes. We were married, we bought a house. I refused to go to childbirth classes on the grounds that I was squeamish.”
“And she accepted that?”
“Not really. Although I never admitted it to her, she knew how I felt about the baby. I think she thought that the first time I held my own child in my arms, all my reservations would vanish and everything would be all right.”
“And was that true?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. I do know that if she had felt I wasn’t adapting, she’d have left me and brought up the child alone. She was a very determined girl, and she wanted that baby.”
“Did you see the baby as driving a wedge between you and Maggie?”
Wolf leaned forward and put his face in his hands. “God help me, I did. I know now how stupid that was. I think I even knew it at the time, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.”
“What happened then?”
“Maggie went into labor about a month early. We weren’t ready for it—I wasn’t, anyway. She called me from her office—she was still working—and I raced over to get her and take her to the hospital. At least, I think that’s how it happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s how I reconstructed it later.”
“You don’t remember?”
“No. I never have. The car went over the center line on La Cienega and hit a truck nearly head on, on her side. The cops found me in a diner across the street, eating a cheeseburger, for Christ’s sake. They told me later that when I was taken back to the wreck to identify Maggie, I passed out. I woke up in the hospital, and I didn’t remember any of it. The last thing I recalled was negotiating with an agent about an actor Jack and I wanted for a picture, a day and a half before.”
“Did some part of you believe that you had deliberately tried to kill the baby, so that you could have Maggie to yourself?”
“A big part of me did. But I couldn’t remember any of the events leading up to the crash, so I’ve never known what I felt at the time.”
“Did you seek any therapy after that?”
“No. I just lived with it.”
“Wolf, my poor dear friend; what hell you put yourself through.”
Wolf turned and looked at him. “I’m back in hell now,” he said.
“We’ll work it out together when this is over,” Mark said.
“Over? When will that be? I’d like to make it be over.”
Mark sighed. “Wolf, you must remember that, while you are dealing with your problems in analysis, you must also deal with the problems of your daily life. You have to do both.”
“So I should call Ed Eagle?”
“I think you should. I can’t see any other way of resolving the situation without causing the most profound damage to yourself.”
“They have the death penalty in New Mexico. That’s pretty profound.”
“There are worse things than dying, Wolf. There are worse things than being in prison.”
“Name one.”
“Just one? The hell you were in after Maggie’s death. The hell you say you’re in again.”
Wolf was quiet for a moment. “You’re right about that, Mark. Tell Eagle I’ll call him in a few days. Don’t tell him my name; just tell him a friend of yours will call soon.”
“Why not now?”
“Because there’s something I have to do. And to get it done, I have to stay dead a little while longer.”
CHAPTER
7
Wolf flew into Los Angeles at dawn and landed at Santa Monica Airport, having given a false name on his flight plan. He had one of the few private T-hangars on the field, the result of years on a waiting list; he taxied there and exchanged the airplane for his Mercedes station wagon, locked the hangar, and drove away. The early-shift lineman at California Aviation waved idly, taking no special note of him. Apparently the boy either didn’t know who he was or didn’t read the papers.
He drove up Bundy to the freeway and headed north, exiting at Sunset Boulevard, then after a few miles turned left onto Stone Canyon, into the plush Bel Air neighborhood, and drove past the Bel Air Hotel. No more breakfast meetings there for a while, he reflected.
A couple of hundred yards past the hotel, he turned into his driveway, using the electric opener to roll back the gates, then again to open the garage door. Julia’s new Mercedes 500SL convertible reminded him that she would not be driving it again. He remembered the fit of happiness she had pitched when he had given it to her. Since his initial outburst of grief in Mark’s office, his emotions had been strange—dead, like Julia. He felt guilty for not being wracked with grief.
He went directly into the kitchen from the garage entrance. The first thing he saw was Julia. She was standing at the sink, wearing her green cashmere dressing gown, washing something. Hearing the door open, she turned and looked at him. Recognition and alarm widened her eyes for a moment, then she fainted.
Wolf went and stood over her, trembling with anger. The woman was Bridget, the live-in maid, and she was wearing Julia’s dressing gown. The bitch, Wolf thought. She couldn’t wait to get into Julia’s clothes. He filled a glass of water at the sink and threw it into her face. Then, as she sputtered to consciousness, he realized that he needed her goodwill, at least for a while. He bent and helped her to her feet.
“Oh, God!” she warbled. “You’re dead, and you’ve come for me.”