Moonbird Boy (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Four)

by Abigail Padgett

  Morley understood his heart's condition. Everything was in place for the announcement of his retirement. All that remained was the closure of this Indian deal in California, and Henderson would manage those formalities on Wednesday, only two days in the future.

  As the voices of monks rose and fell about him, Alexander Morley listened to his heart and breathed with the ancient music. He'd felt an arrhythmia earlier and carefully placed the correct medication under his tongue. Then he'd stretched out to rest in the darkening office. It was his favorite time now, the quiet hours of early evening when everyone was gone and he could feel the power MedNet commanded. It was a vibration more intellectual than visceral, a cool, deep awareness beneath the chanting, beneath everything.

  There were bigger companies than MedNet, but none as perfectly tuned to the most profitable dimensions of human suffering. That was his gift, the ability to exploit hope. He'd molded MedNet from its earlier identity as a hospital management concern into a leader in the field, known for its dynamic marketing strategies and impressive profit margin.

  The medical community damned him as a charlatan, but he didn't care. It didn't matter. Because the only dimension of Alexander Morley still pure and innocent enough to care about opinion was hidden safely in a fantasied monastic sanctuary only accessible through the haunting music that now bathed him. He'd cut out his soul and preserved it there, apart. Everything else was business. Everything else was money, and power.

  As he relaxed in the darkness he imagined that for this moment the two parts of himself were one. Alexander Morley the successful businessman and Alexander Morley the idealistic boy in medical school were one person, the soul no longer held apart from the man. It would happen in this place, he thought. And it could happen only now, as he prepared to leave MedNet behind him. But strangely, it didn't feel good. It made him sick.

  "How could you do this?" his own young voice rang in his head. "You're no doctor, you're nothing but a salesman, a con artist. You've spent your life selling empty medical packaging to people so blinded by anguish that they'd pay for illusion. As a doctor you're a joke. But as a human being you're a fraud!"

  Morley felt his heart twitch beneath his sternum. His own naive young voice had made him ill. He was ill, and there was something wrong in the room. A noise, barely audible under the soaring chants. A door opening, then closing.

  There shouldn't be anybody in MedNet's offices now. He'd personally made the arrangement with the cleaning service. None of the crew who cleaned the building at night were to enter MedNet's offices until after eight-thirty, when he would be gone. The intrusion made him angry, but he deliberately calmed himself with deep breaths, used the remote control to diminish the music's volume, and slowly turned his chair toward the door.

  What he saw set in motion a sequence of events that his mind tracked and defined even as they were happening. There was someone there. Morley could see the shapes of head, shoulders, arms against the teak double doors leading to MedNet's reception area. It was someone large, taller than he. Someone covered in cloth, like a sheet. A child's Halloween nightmare.

  As it began to move toward him, he felt a tightening of his skin. That was the constriction of blood vessels, he knew, caused by a hormone called epinephrine his adrenal glands released when he experienced fear. The epinephrine was also causing his heart to pound. His adrenal glands couldn't know his heart was weak; there was no way to stop their automatic response to his sense of alarm.

  "What are you doing here?" he barked, lowering the chair's footrest and standing. "Get out!"

  The strange figure was close now. He could see something in its right hand. A knife. It had to be one of the syndicate goons, he assumed. This sort of cheap nonsense was their style. But why? MedNet had paid them to back off the deal the Indian was trying to grab. Why would they send one of their lackeys to intimidate him?

  "You've been paid," he insisted over the rapid thumping in his chest. "This is a mistake."

  But the raised knife kept coming.

  And then the thumping ceased. In its place was a frenzied squirming sensation that Morley's mind quickly named "ventricular fibrillation." Wildly he pulled open his desk drawer and wrenched the top from a vial of tiny white pills. But the force of his movement sent them scattering like insects across the expensive carpet at his feet.

  His heart was no longer pumping blood to any vital organ in his body. Already, he knew, his oxygen-starved brain had begun to shut down, sacrificing the luxury of consciousness to conserve resources for its most primitive segments. The old, reptilian brain segments without the direction of which every organ would stop functioning. A crushing pain had already filled his chest and spilled down his left arm.

  Falling to his knees, he groped for the white specks on the floor. But a huge, sandaled foot had covered the only pills within reach, and was grinding them into the carpet. The toenails, Morley noticed with frantic acuity just before darkness swallowed him, were painted.

  For several seconds nothing moved in Alexander Morley's office. Then his body shuddered briefly and a strangled, guttural sound came from his throat to join the ancient music in which he'd imagined his soul could hide. Shortly after that the only living thing remaining in the room opened the teak double doors and was gone. In the dark a choir of Spanish monks sang sonorous monophonic chants, over and over.

  Bob Thompson had never seen MedNet's offices at night. For that matter, he thought, he'd rarely seen them during the day either. For the last ten years there'd been no reason to go to Phoenix at all, except for the occasional command get-together, since MedNet's board communicated hourly during the business week through an elaborate electronic network. He kept an office in Santa Fe where he lived, and the other board members did the same. But the Phoenix offices were MedNet's hub, the panopticon from which Alexander Morley oversaw the corporation's every move.

  Thompson wondered if the old man was up there right now, listening to his church music. Everybody knew about Morley's hobby. Brockman had even given him a cat-o'-ninetails one year as a birthday present, and Morley had smiled genially at the joke. But he never explained why he sat listening to monks singing in his office, and nobody asked.

  The night cleaning crew was in the building. Thompson decided to risk it, go on up and beard the lion in his den. Maybe this would be the right time. Maybe he could actually talk to Alexander Morley.

  He'd flown into Phoenix cold with panic. He knew Henderson had already worked a deal with the Japanese for the first franchise on the Ghost Flower model. And the deal was a gold mine. A man named John Takuya had heard about it in Tokyo from a friend whose bank had been approached for a loan to fund the endeavor. And Bob Thompson had sent Takuya's teenaged kids a couple of pairs of highly prized Levi's after Takuya mentioned at a meeting in San Francisco that he hadn't had time to get out and buy them. When he called to thank Bob Thompson for the gesture, he also congratulated Thompson on the MedNet deal. That was when Bob Thompson knew what Alexander Morley was doing to him. Two hours later he caught a plane to Phoenix.

  The security guard at the lobby desk checked him against a roster of MedNet personnel, and then told him to take the service elevator to the twelfth-floor suite. Morley was still up there, the guard told Thompson. Later than usual.

  When the elevator door opened to admit him, one of the cleaning staff brushed past him holding a bundle of sheets. Thompson noticed her because she was almost as tall as he, even in the flat sandals that showed off her painted toenails to dramatic advantage against smooth skin the color of bittersweet chocolate. No longer in her prime, the woman still carried herself with a sardonic worldliness he recognized. She'd been a hooker when she was young, he was sure. And even pushing sixty, as he was sure she was, she had a style, an attraction.

  As he hit twelve on the panel of floor indicator buttons, Bob Thompson grinned and shook his head. Morley was throwing him in the toilet, he was being replaced in the job he'd given the best years of his life, and he still
couldn't stop looking at loose ladies. Even loose cleaning ladies who hadn't seen twenty since he'd learned to love them at fifteen. He guessed it was just the way he was.

  From MedNet's reception area he could hear the old man's music howling through the doors of his office. It was creepy, Thompson thought, like something from another world. The reception area lights were left on until the cleaning crew finished, but only darkness was visible beneath Morley's doors. Thompson knocked on them, waited, and knocked again. Then he opened them.

  "Alex?" he said in the gloom. "I need to talk to you."

  In the wedge of light falling through the open doors nothing answered except the sound of voices chanting in a language he couldn't understand. Then he saw the old man on the floor.

  "Oh, my God!" he exhaled, kneeling to touch a hand that had been clawing for something on the carpet. The hand was cool. And the wrist had no pulse.

  From the receptionist's desk he called 911 and then security. But there was nothing, he knew, that anyone could do for Alexander Morley now. He hoped the old man had gone to whatever his music meant to him. And he hoped there would be enough time to decipher Morley's files and get to San Diego before it was too late. Before a man named Henderson stole his future.

  Chapter 27

  Bo put a bowl of fresh water on the kitchen floor and watched as the puppy's pink tongue sent splashes flying in every direction. Had Mildred been this messy as a pup? Bo found the memory missing, obscured by other long-ago events. The fights with Mark. The divorce. The crushing sense of failure that was worse than everything else. And then her sister, Laurie's, suicide. Mildred had been with Bo through it all, a stalwart presence. But her puppy days were lost in the kaleidoscoping human drama that was Bo's past.

  "You're making a mess," Bo told the little dachshund, "and now your ears are all wet." The dog merely shook her head and then began a series of bounding dashes through the apartment, stopping abruptly to sniff at the leg of Bo's easel, a stack of magazines under the TV, the bedroom carpet where Mildred's basket had been.

  "There was a fox terrier there," Bo explained, scooping the dog into her arms. "She was my best friend. Let me show you her picture." In her tiny dining room studio Bo pointed to the painting of Mildred still on the easel. "See?" she said. "That's what she looked like." The puppy seemed to contemplate the painting briefly and then licked Bo's cheek.

  "Thank you," Bo said. "I'm glad you understand because ..."

  "Bo?"

  It was Andrew waving through the front window. Bo set the dog down and opened her apartment door to a smiling pediatrician holding a sheaf of white daisies and a beribboned wine bottle. He was wearing jeans, a chamois shirt, and a new Portuguese fisherman's hat and looked, Bo thought, quite dashing.

  "The wine's for after I show you what I found today," he said, kissing her. "Aagghh! Something's eating my ankle!"

  "I think she's just sniffing it." Bo grinned as she took the flowers to the sink and then reached under it for a vase. "I'm just keeping her tonight. It's a favor to Jane and Mindy at the dog wash."

  Andrew LaMarche was already on his stomach on the floor, making uncharacteristic noises at the puppy dancing around his head. "What's her name?" he asked.

  Bo was pouring 7-Up into the vase. "Gretel. The little girl who owned her called her Gretel."

  "She doesn't look like a Gretel," Andrew observed thoughtfully. "Bo, why are you putting the flowers in 7-Up?"

  "It's half water, half 7-Up. I read somewhere that lemon-lime soda pop makes flowers last longer. And you're right, she really doesn't look like a Gretel."

  "We should think of a more suitable name," he said, rolling onto his back with the puppy in his arms. "How about Daphne?"

  "Daphne Dachshund?" Bo answered, making a face. "Sounds like Daffy Duck. And we can't give her a new name because I'm just keeping her for the night. So what's this surprise you've found?"

  "Oh. Well, it's a shame. She's really cute. And the surprise," he said, standing, "is a surprise. I'm going to take you to see it."

  Waves of enthusiasm seemed to cascade from him, making invisible patterns in the room. A sense of change, things going forward headlong and sparkling as if propelled by light. The sensation made Bo dizzy. "Okay," she said. "Just let me change clothes. Can I go look at this thing in sweats?"

  "Sweats are fine. And we'll take Daphne."

  "Her name isn't Daphne!" Bo yelled from her bedroom closet, which suddenly felt safe and familiar. A snug, shadowy haven. For a moment she considered just closing the door and staying there. But of course that would be insane. Grinning, she buried her face in the sleeves of her own blouses hanging in the dark. "I'm just tired," she told them. "And I have this sense that the world's shifting." Then she pulled on her favorite gray sweatshirt with its hood and deep pockets, found the matching pants, and emerged. Next, socks.

  "In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so pretty," she sang in her grandmother's brogue while scrounging through a dresser drawer, "I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone. As she wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow, singing cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o." There were no socks that matched.

  "What's that song?" Andrew asked from the bedroom door.

  "Just an Irish song about Molly Malone. She was a fishmonger. My grandmother used to sing it. And I'm not wearing socks."

  "I gave up socks when I fell in love with you," he said solemnly. Then he began the song again an octave lower than Bo had sung it. Joining him, Bo noticed that their voices blended nicely before drifting out the deck doors and vanishing over the sea. After a few practice verses, he felt for the alto part, found it, and belted out the chorus with a spirit that her grandmother, Bo thought, would have applauded. From the floor near Bo's remaining tennis shoe another voice joined them in a small but heartfelt howl. The puppy, her still-stubby hound nose aimed at the ceiling, was singing. There was no denying the message.

  "You're Molly Malone!" Bo cried, dropping to her knees. "That's who you are." The puppy scrambled into Bo's arms, her little tail wagging furiously. Bo felt common sense, the entire world of order, crack and slide away like pond ice in the spring. "And it's way too soon for another dog," she went on, "but since you can't be with Lindsey, you belong here, with us. I'm not letting them take you back, Molly. You're staying!

  Bo was sure she was crying, although it was hard to tell with Molly licking her face and Andrew wrapping her in chamois.

  "You said 'us,' Bo," he whispered as they all sat on the floor. "You told Molly she belonged with us. That must mean there is an us. Oh, Bo, I'm going to get that dog her own portfolio of growth stocks and a lifetime supply of T-bones!"

  "She'll take the stocks," Bo sniffled. "And there's been an us all along, Andy." No way to retrieve anything resembling structure now, she thought. Amazing how it's never there when you need it. "It's just that you scare me with these constant demands for something I don't want," she went on, feeling herself on a mental ski slope. "I don't want to be married, Andy. For a lot of reasons that's an identity that just isn't me. And every time you..."

  "I know," he said, taking her hand and leaning his head backward to rest against her bed. "I've been thinking about it, about how I'd feel if the situation were reversed." He turned to face her, his gray eyes twinkling. "And I'd hate it. I'd feel that you weren't listening to me, that you didn't even know me, that you were trying to force me to be somebody else."

  Bo retrieved her shoelaces from Molly's needlelike teeth and tied her shoe. The laces were wet. "You're close," she told Andrew, "but there's one thing you can't even imagine."

  "What?"

  Okay, Bradley, finish it. Fling yourself into thin air and just hope you don't crash and burn.

  "You can't imagine what it's like to live inside my brain," she explained. "It's different, Andy. I don't just mean the obvious manic-depressive symptoms. Even when I'm fine, I'm different. When I was young I wanted to be like everybody else, watched people constantly so I could lea
rn to be like them. And every time I overreacted or did something that made them shut down and turn away, I was ashamed. It was like this black wave with a bilious, purple crest sweeping over me. But I don't feel that way anymore. I really like being different, being completely who I am. But it's fragile, and it's something I've come to terms with on my own, alone. Now you want to rearrange that identity, and you can't, Andy. Only I can change what I am, and I don't want to. But that doesn't mean what I am doesn't want you. I do."

  "I do, too," he said softly. "Just the way you are. No more demands for towels monogrammed 'Mr. and Mrs.,' I promise. My parents had towels monogrammed 'Mr. and Mrs.' They were miserable together. Hey, is it too late for me to show you my big surprise?"

  Bo felt something like ground rising beneath her fall. Molly, curled like a fur donut on her stomach, had fallen asleep. "I'm pretty tired, but I'll last for another hour or so," she answered quite calmly, she thought, under the circumstances, "but what about our pup?"

  "Here." Scooping Molly gently in one hand, he tucked her in the big patch pocket on the right side of his shirt and held her there as they walked to his car. During the drive she stretched her head and front paws out to rest on his shoulder. Observing this, Bo stifled a bizarre impulse to tell him she'd changed her mind and would marry him now, tonight.

  "You're beautiful," she said instead, and then settled in to wonder why everything chose to happen at the same time. He was driving up the coast on I-5 toward Del Mar, the tiny, pricey beach community where he owned a condo. Bo assumed the surprise would be there. Maybe a painting he'd bought in Germany, she thought. It would be something like that. But he passed the expected street and continued along the darkened beach road where Torrey pines bent over surf gilded silver in moonlight.

  "Well, here it is," he finally said after turning off the village's main street and making several turns in the residential area leading to the beach. He had stopped in a cul-de-sac with a sagging chain link fence at its end. Beyond the fence was a bristling field of dry grass sloping to the Amtrak tracks and then the beach. In the amber streetlight Bo could see a ranch-style bungalow with blue shingles, white shutters, and white window boxes trailing pink Martha Washington geraniums into the night. The bungalow was on the left. On the right was a looming shadow in a yard overgrown with weeds.