Daughter of Darkness
Page 18
Neely arrived half an hour late. "Sorry."
"You always are."
Neely sat down and signaled across the shadowy bar to the bartender. After all these years, the man behind the bar was well-acquainted with Neely's needs, shot of rye with beer chaser. No doubt just what his granddad drank back in County Cork.
Neely kept up with the times. During the twenty years Coffey had known him, Neely had been, variously, a hippie, a disco lady killer, and was now something resembling a boomer, the expensive double-breasted suit, the hundred dollar haircut (sideburns shaved straight across far up on the ear) and ' the overwhelming aftershave. He'd always been one of those ridiculously good looking guys whose appearance misled many into thinking he was a creampuff. These days he looked like a suburban lothario who had spent one too many afternoons in a sleazy hotel with the wife of a close friend. Nothing is sadder to see than lover boys (or lover girls, for that matter) giving way to flesh and age. He had four kids by three wives and was always half a step ahead of all the loan companies he was in hock to. Anyway, not even the loan companies wanted his business, which was pretty sad given the fact that he was one of the city's ablest and best-known reporters. In the future, he'd probably have to start taking out juice loans. Someday, one of the juice loans would cost him his life. The mob loved to make examples of prominent people who didn't pay up.
"We had to tear out part of the front page," Neely said.
"Must be big."
"Very big. You know a private investigator named Cummings?"
"Sure. He's the one who works for all the rich people."
"Not anymore, he doesn't. Somebody killed him tonight. In a parking garage."
Coffey tensed.
"They killed a client, too. Guy named David Foster."
Coffey almost physically jerked at the mention of the name.
He could feel himself become colder, as if his body temperature was dropping quickly.
"You all right?" Neely said.
"Yeah."
"You look terrible."
"So do you."
"Yeah, but the difference is I cultivate it, Coffey. I'm too old to be the male ingenue anymore, so now I have to be the mysterious older man. It's sort of like changing from a young Robert Redford into an older Robert Mitchum. The ladies love it."
"How's Emily?"
For a minute, Neely forgot he was a lover boy, and that he'd almost won the Pulitzer twice, and that he was getting old and scared. He actually even forgot entirely about himself for this brief time. Emily was his daughter. She'd been born with cerebral palsy. Neely loved her with a ferocity and protectiveness that redeemed all the other bullshit in his soul. "She's getting along pretty good. They're making some progress, the scientists, I mean. People make fun of Jerry Lewis, but he does a damn good job for the cause. He really does." Then, and incredibly there were tears in his eyes, he reached inside his stylish suit coat and brought out a folded sheet of white paper. He opened it up. A pink crayon drawing of a birthday cake with the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DADDY! were scrawled across the face of the paper. "Emily drew it for me." His love for his eight-year-old daughter overwhelmed Coffey and for once, he actually felt a fondness for Neely.
Neely made a kind of sniffling sound, tears, and then reverently folded the paper and put it away. And then he went back to being the Neely everybody knew and hated. "So how come you wanted to see me, Coffey?"
At the moment, Coffey really wanted to talk about Cummings and his murder. But that wasn't why he was here. "Quinlan."
"The shrink slash ass-bandit."
"Yeah."
Neely smiled icily. "I wonder how much ass that guy has gotten in his lifetime. The word is he makes it with most of his female patients."
"That I've heard. Tell me something about him I haven't heard."
Neely told Coffey about Quinlan's CIA connections. How he did ground-breaking work with mind control and behavior modification. Then they fired Quinlan.
"Why?" Coffey asked.
"Well, as usual with the CIA, nobody knows for sure. But there were a lot of rumors that Quinlan was even more radical than the people before him. He started working with career criminals, trying to change their inclinations. And then-though there was never any proof of this-that he started doing the opposite, too."
"What's the opposite?"
"Demonstrating that he could take an average, decent person and make him capable of being a criminal."
"In other words, he could turn criminals into law-abiding people, and law-abiding people into criminals."
"Essentially, yes."
"Did it work?" Coffey said.
"Again, all I've got is rumors. The word is that he had some success, but that several of his patients ended up in mental institutions for the rest of their lives."
"Fortunes of war as the CIA sees it."
"Exactly."
Coffey thought instantly of what Hal had said about Jenny's two personalities, how one of them seemed artificially imposed. Mind-controlling drugs and psychotherapy would be one combined way to impose such a personality. As Hal had said, that sort of mental manipulation went back to at least the Korean War.
"Anyway, he came back to Chicago and set up a psychiatric practice. Strictly carriage trade. There used to be a joke about him that you had to bring your stock portfolio with you when you went for your first visit. His lifestyle got a lot better, too. He actually bought himself a Maserati, every boy's ultimate wet dream. He dated all the society women, too. If you remember the mid-eighties, there was kind of a trend back to the forties. Night clubs and dinner jackets and things like that. Well, our friend Quinlan reveled in all that stuff."
"Then he opened his psychiatric hospital?"
Neely laughed. "Better known as Joliet East." Joliet was the state prison. "If you were rich enough and in trouble enough, Quinlan could get you shunted into his hospital. Your trial would either be put off indefinitely or the state would just forget about you."
"You'd stay in the hospital?"
"Right. But unless you were completely uncontrollable-and some of them are-you could get used to life there real easily. It's the psychiatric equivalent of a country club prison. They even have weekly conjugal visits."
"A big family name like Stafford?"
Neely grinned. "Jenny Stafford was everything, man. Money and beauty. That's about the time I first started writing about him and his hospital. He was really smitten for a long time. The word I got from the hospital people inside was that Quinlan has sexual relationships with all the women when they come in. They usually don't last very long. He gets tired of them and then hands them off to one of his lieutenants. But I'm told that with Jenny Stafford it was different. He really seemed to be smitten for a time. He kept her for several months."
"Nice of him," Coffey said, trying to keep any bitterness from his voice.
"You ever see Jenny Stafford?"
"Once, I guess," Coffey lied.
"Well, I'd keep her for a lot longer than a few months. Or I think I would, anyway. I guess she's pretty screwed up." He tapped a finger against his skull to indicate crazy. "She convinced her parents to take her out of there. They found this other shrink."
"Priscilla Bowman?"
"Yeah, how'd you know that, Coffey?"
"I just picked it up somewhere, I guess."
"Well, do you get the irony?"
"What irony?"
"Don't you know who Priscilla Bowman is? Or was?"
"I guess not."
"She was Quinlan's old associate, the one he turned his psychiatric practice over to."
"And she took over Jenny Stafford?"
"Who better? Bowman had worked with Stafford for several years. She knew the various techniques he used. She'd even fallen under the sway of his CIA techniques for a while."
"So why was she helping the Stafford family?"
"L-o-v-e. She'd had this on-again off-again thing with our friendly guru Quinlan when they were still working togethe
r. I guess she seriously thought he was going to march her down the aisle someday. But his zipper problem got to be too much for her. So working on Jenny was a kind of spite. Rubbing his face in one of his failures."
"That's why they had the falling out?"
"I guess he's pretty hard to work with, too. She just got tired of being treated like a servant instead of an associate."
"I'll be damned," Coffey said.
The bartender automatically replenished their drinks.
"Think you can handle two Diet Pepsis in a row?" Neely said.
"I'll give it my best."
Neely knocked back his fresh shot of rye, shuddered orgasmically, and then said, "So what's your interest in ail this?"
"My next novel."
"Say, that's right. I forgot. I keep thinking you're still a cop." A sip of beer. "By the way, I really liked your first novel except I guessed the killer about halfway through."
Coffey laughed. "I'll try harder next time." He checked his watch. "Well, I'd better go." He dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table. "Here's for the drinks."
"Hey, you don't need to do that," Neely said. But the hungry way he scooped the money up told Coffey how appreciative Neely was.
"Give your daughter a kiss for me," Coffey said.
"Thanks, Coffey."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The Ford van had been parked across the street for forty-five minutes now, ever since Coffey had left. A couple of bored boys, ages eight and six respectively, thought of getting up on the bumper and trying to see past the dark-tinted windows. But there was something ominous about the van-what was the strange flat black box on its roof, and why did the van make that faint humming noise?-so they decided to work their way down the street to find something else to interest them.
***
The headache was so bad it woke her up. She lay, for a time, concerned only about her headache and how it might have gotten so bad.
Nothing to drink, that she could recall. No flu. Or any other kind of sickness. No special stress came to mind either.
So what was the headache all about?
She sat up in bed. Bra and panties were all she wore. The funny thing was, these didn't seem to be any bra and panties she'd ever seen before. These were almost comically sexy underthings. They made Victoria's Secret seem downright virginal.
She stood up. Walked over to a moonlit window.
Where the hell was she?
The window was filled with several backyards. Each with an outdoor grille, a clothesline, a garage. Suburbia.
But Linda Fleming didn't belong in suburbia. She was a city girl. And anyway, what was she doing in this strange house? She found a black sweater and black jeans and put them on.
Not hers either. But they fit well. She then put her feet into the black flats by the bed. Capezios. Not a brand she favored. Too expensive. Flats were flats. Why pay for a brand name?
On the bureau, she found the gun. The gun took her back to her small-town days. Growing up. Her father and brother had been gun nuts. When they weren't hunting, they were cleaning their guns, or hanging out at the gun store downtown where the owner was a member of the KKK and didn't care who knew it.
The gun felt good in her hand. She wondered who had left it behind, and why.
She had an easy time with the weapon, checking it for ammunition. She'd picked up a lot of pointers from the men in her family. She wasn't a gun nut exactly, but she liked the feel of a gun in her hand. No doubt about it.
The dark house would usually have scared her. But for some reason, tonight she liked the darkness.
She left the bedroom, groped her way along a dark hallway, and then came out into a living room. She kept a firm grip on the gun as she entered this new part of the house. She had no idea what she'd find.
After the living room came the tiny dining room and then the kitchen. No sign of anybody, anything. How the hell had she gotten here? She didn't panic too much because she'd had other nights like this. Had a little too much to drink-or, occasionally, a little too much dope to smoke-and would then find herself in some stranger's house, with said stranger gone.
But that was usually in the morning.
At night when she woke up in a strange house, the stranger was usually next to her in bed. Snoring drunkenly.
So where was the stranger who'd brought her here, anyway?
***
The Ford van was now fixing its infrared homing device on the house. The information it received: the sole inhabitant of the house was up and moving about.
***
Linda Fleming even went to the bathroom in the dark. She still felt comforted somehow by the shadows, a dark womb.
She realized, washing her hands and wanting some lotion to put on them, that she hadn't seen her purse since waking up.
She found a purse on the kitchen table. A small, black leather Gucci bag, which probably belonged to the woman whose clothes she was wearing. She opened it up and found three crisp hundred dollar bills inside.
She smiled and then shrugged. Since she had borrowed the woman's clothes, she might as well borrow her money, too.
In fact, she thought, she might as well take the purse while she was at it. She left the money in the purse and then slipped the small weapon in there, too.
She started out of the kitchen but then remembered that she'd forgotten something. The thought came so abruptly that it stirred her headache again. A bolt of pain struck her right eye as she stood there.
There was something she needed in this kitchen…
Twenty minutes later, a Yellow Cab pulled up ahead of the Ford van.
Linda Fleming came running out of the house and up to the cab. When she opened the door, a blast of gangsta rap music assaulted her. The driver was a shrunken old man in his late sixties. A white man. Go figure.
Linda got in the cab. The gangsta geeza drove them away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Margie Ryan started scratching herself almost right away.
She liked to think of herself as a tough-ass cop, and in most respects she certainly was. She'd seen-and effectively dealt with-every kind of bloodshed and carnage imaginable. She had been shot at, stabbed, and nearly drowned. One time when she was working undercover, she'd nearly been gang-raped by three men who looked as if they belonged at the Abominable Snowman's family reunion. She never had a single nightmare about any of this. Not once.
But put her in a room where somebody was sneezing…
Margie had always wondered where her hypochondria came from. Her parents were sane and sensible Irishers who felt ill only when they truly were ill. Nor had this psychological malady possessed any of her five brothers and sisters. Indeed, they used to take great delight in sneezing and coughing in little Margie's face just so they could watch her go crazy with hypochondrical symptoms.
So tonight at dinner, nine-year-old Brian said, "Sister Mary Ellen said that we should tell our parents there's a lot of measles going around the school."
At which, the dinner table noise came to a halt. No serving plates were passed. No silverware clanked against china. Nine-year-old Sam didn't make any of his armpit-farting noises (if armpit-farting was an Olympic event, Sam would win at least a half dozen gold medals). Neither of the twins exchanged one of their whispered private jokes. And Mike, Margie's stout insurance salesman husband, seemed to hold his breath. He looked at his beloved wife (sixteen years next month) and said, "You don't have the measles."
"Who said I have the measles?" Margie said defensively.
"Mommy's a handcriac," five-year-old Jason said.
All the other kids giggled.
"That's 'hypochondriac,' Jason," Mike said helpfully. "And yes, she is."
"Used to be," Margie said. "No more."
Mike loved to tease her. "Then you won't have measles by the time we go to bed tonight?"
"I read an article," she said.
"An article?" Mike said.
"In Reader's Digest."
"I thought our subscription expired."
"It did. I happened to read this in the dentist's office the other day."
"Good old Dr. Fitzpatrick," Mike said, "he still reminds me of the dentist in The Marathon Man."
"We were talking about Reader's Digest."
"Oh, yeah, right. Sorry."
"There was an article in there about hypchondria and it really helped me."
Mike shoveled food into his face, a half pound of mashed potatoes all mooshed up with green peas. "So what's it say?" His mouth was so full, Margie could barely understand him.
"It said, as if you're really listening anyway, that hypochondria is just a form of stress and depression that you develop when you're young, usually as the result of a trauma."
"Isn't that what they said about Ted Bundy, too?"
"Very funny. Anyway, it's pretty clear that I started in on hypochondria when my dad died. You know, when I was six, I mean. That's how I dealt with it… every time I got really lonely for him, I'd start feeling sick."