Regeneration

by Allan, Barbara

  Joy put the fern in the front seat of her car, under a piece of plastic Raoul had provided—the plastic would come in handy if she ever decided to refinish the stand—and, as if the leafy thing were her precious child, carefully put the car’s seat belt around it.

  Then back over the pass she went, glancing at the plant every now and then like a worried mother checking her baby in its car seat, once nearly rear-ending a Toyota.

  At home, she ceremoniously placed the green fern on the top of the stand, a crown for a queen, and stepped back to assay her choice.

  Perfect.

  The only thing that could make her happier at this moment would be a call from Jack, saying he was back...but it was way too early....

  For the remainder of the day, Joy busied herself hand-washing some of her business clothes in the bathroom sink.

  Dry-clean only, my ass! she thought, as she gently scrubbed the cream-colored silk blouse Jack had gotten the wine spill out of with club soda. Club soda was wet, wasn’t it? And the blouse didn’t get ruined.

  There was a conspiracy between the clothes manufacturers and dry cleaners to bilk the poor consumer! Cold water and a little mild detergent would clean any garment as well, if not better, than dry-cleaning—and with no chemical smell.

  Joy, smiling smugly at her cleverness to save money, hung the wet clothing on padded hangers over the tub. (Except for a black Tricot sleeveless blouse, which had shrunk to a size-two toddler. But that was the only casualty.)

  Then Joy curled up on the couch, waiting for Jack’s call, with a book on furniture refinishing she’d found in a bargain bin; as the afternoon darkened to dusk, Joy got drowsy and decided to just rest her eyes....

  Sometime in the early morning hours, she woke from a nightmare that left as bad a taste in her mind as the one in her mouth.

  In the dream she’d been back at Simmons College, in the bell tower. Rick was hanging by the rope, his face purple, his neck scraped raw and bleeding; only he wasn’t dead yet. And this time his wide eyes were staring directly at her, his mouth moving, tongue lolling grotesquely. He seemed—in his last choking moments—to be trying to tell her something. But she was just screaming and screaming, so loud she couldn’t hear him but couldn’t stop herself....

  Joy forced herself to wake up.

  In the movies, people always woke from nightmares by bolting upright, soaked with sweat. But Joy, on her side, curled fetally, felt cold, gathering a quilt around her, from where it had been folded over the back of the couch; and it took her a while to shake the dreadful feeling, and even longer to fall back to sleep, which was fitful at best.

  In the morning, she overslept, causing instant panic, making her dress in a frenzied hurry. Gone was the serenity of Sunday. She gulped some orange juice, the clear capsule her only breakfast, then rushed out of the house.

  The early morning air was an unpleasant cocktail of haze and smog, and the traffic heavy, adding to her misery. Why hadn’t Jack called last night? she wondered, half-irritable, half-concerned.

  At the advertising agency, when Susan wasn’t at her desk to handle the calls, Joy’s irritation grew; Mondays were usually hectic. It was one thing for a boss to be late, but a secretary should always be punctual. Where was the considerate phone call from Susan saying she was sick, or otherwise detained?

  Though barely half an hour late, Joy found her answer machine blinking frantically with messages. She just had time before the Gray Fox’s Monday morning staff meeting to listen to them, all but one related to various clients.

  But one, thank God, was Jack.

  “Sorry about last night,” his voice said. “My flight was postponed and then finally canceled—too late to call you. Anyway, I took advantage of the layover to do a little more work, here—I may not be able to get back till tomorrow. Love you.”

  Love you too, she told the machine.

  By one o’clock, with no sign of Susan, Joy’s irritation with her secretary turned to concern. And still later, her concern became worry after calling Susan at home and only getting the machine.

  Terrible thoughts began to race through Joy’s mind. What if Dr. Green had given Susan the experimental drug, and she’d had a terrible reaction? Or what if that Internet “friend” was a psycho...a serial killer, even?

  Skipping a three o’clock departmental meeting, Joy stopped by accounting and asked for Susan’s home address, then rushed out of the building.

  It was nearly four in the afternoon by the time Joy parked the Jag in front of the run-down stucco mission-style apartment complex in a questionable neighborhood in West Hollywood. Turning off the car, hoping her hubcaps were safe, Joy felt sorry for Susan; her own bungalow was a palace compared to this....

  A rusted iron gate creaked opened to a small courtyard with a postage-stamp swimming pool that hadn’t been cleaned in some while. The dwellings surrounding the courtyard looked more like motel rooms than apartments.

  Joy walked down a dreary row of them, stopping at number five. She opened a patched screen door and knocked on the warped, paint-peeling front door.

  She waited, then knocked again, this time putting her face close to the door. “Susan! It’s me, Joy! Are you home?”

  Ear pressed to the wood, she could hear nothing inside.

  She tried to peer in the front window, but the curtains were drawn tight.

  Turning, Joy wondered if she’d have any luck around back, when she noticed the last apartment across the courtyard. Below the number “10” on the door was the word “Concierge.”

  If she hadn’t been so worried about Susan, she might have laughed at such a grand designation for a slum super.

  Hurrying across the courtyard, she banged on the super’s door. This time someone answered: a short, stocky woman in a cotton housedress with a cartoony paw-print print.

  “Have you seen Susan today?” Joy asked anxiously. “Susan Henderson—in number five!”

  The concierge shrugged, bringing up a pudgy hand with a burning cigarette in it. “You may find this hard to believe, but my clientele and me don’t socialize all that much.”

  “I think she may be sick. She didn’t show up for work.”

  “I’ll call Geraldo,” the woman said, the cigarette dangling in her lips now, as she started to close the door in Joy’s face.

  Joy grabbed the doorknob and held the door open. Exasperated, Joy asked, “Can you let me in her apartment?”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed.

  “I’m her boss!” Joy explained. “Please...do you have an extra key?”

  “I forget.”

  Sighing, Joy dug into her purse, handed the woman a precious five-dollar bill.

  The woman smiled, cigarette bobbling, and turned, disappearing into the black hole of her apartment. A moment later, she returned and, with thick fingers, held out a key.

  “Bring it back,” she said sternly.

  “For my deposit, you mean?” Joy said, with a sneer.

  Joy hurried to Susan’s apartment, unlocked and opened the front door, and stepped inside.

  The air was heavy with that stale apartment smell—the combined odors of everyone who’d ever lived there. And it was pitch-dark in there....All the curtains closed, shades pulled. Joy left the front door wide open to allow a shaft of light in.

  “Susan?” she called.

  No answer.

  Joy moved slowly through the cramped living room, which was—as best she could see in the dim light—filled with a depressing array of eclectic furniture. It was apparent Susan hadn’t even tried to make the apartment cheerful; no feminine or homey touch, no matter how pathetic.

  The kitchen, off the living room, was even more dismal: ghastly, Pepto-Bismol-pink cupboards, a tired dinette set and a yellow linoleum floor that may once have been white. Joy stuck her head in just long enough to see that Susan wasn’t there.

  Then down a short, narrow hall to the bedroom, where Joy—suddenly shivering with dread—was certain she’d find Susan, either coma
tose or dead....

  But to her great relief, Joy found the bedroom empty.

  This, the most pleasant of all the rooms, was probably where Susan spent her time. A stack of used paperbacks—historical romances—was piled high on the floor near an old rocker draped with a patchwork quilt. A stereo arrayed with ancient L.P.s (Monkees, Ronettes, Bobby Rydell) sat atop a dresser. In here, the air did not reek of houseatosis, rather redolent of the floral perfume Susan wore to work.

  Joy moved on, to the only room left: a bathroom at the end of the hall. As she approached the half-open door, she could hear the drip, drip, drip of a sink or bathtub faucet.

  Again the fear, the dread gripped her. She reached a hand out to push the door wide, and her heart began to pound. An image of poor Susan flashed through Joy’s mind: jilted by her Saturday night date, unable to cope with her disease anymore, lying dead in the tub, wrists slashed....

  The door creaked open, and as the entire bathroom came into view, Joy held her breath, eyes darting from the floor to the toilet to the sink to the tub.

  No Susan.

  Joy sighed in relief. But where could her secretary be? Maybe Joy was worrying for nothing. Maybe Susan would show up at any moment, with some silly, inconsequential explanation, and they would both laugh at Joy’s overreactive concerns. Joy crossed the bathroom, to the ruststained sink, to shut off the annoying drip so she could think.

  It was then that she caught a motion in the cabinet mirror, behind her.

  She shrieked as hands grasped her shoulders, whirled her around, and backed her up against the cold hard sink, flailing at the man in the blue suit, who reached in his breast jacket pocket.

  Was he going to shoot her?

  “Who are you?” she shouted, and it echoed in the little bathroom.

  The man, tall, tanned, with a rugged face and Indian cheekbones, pulled out an identification wallet.

  “Sergeant Ryan, LAPD,” he said. The face on the ID was the same hard face looking at her. “Now let’s move on to who you are? Which for starters isn’t Susan Henderson.”

  It was a moment before Joy could speak, before she could get her heart out of her throat.

  “Joy Lerner,” she said. “I’m a friend of Susan’s—actually, her boss.” Anger replaced fright in a knee-jerk reaction; she slapped at his forearm. “What the fuck d’you have to scare me for?”

  “The door was open,” he shrugged, as if that were an adequate explanation. “You have a reason to be here?”

  “Do you have a reason to be here?” Joy snapped. But as soon as she’d asked it, she realized the implications of her own question.

  “Oh, my God, has something happened to Susan?” The words came tumbling out. “Please...I told you. I’m her boss and I’m her friend...do you know where she is?”

  The eyes in the hard face softened.

  “You’d better come in the other room, Ms. Lerner,” Sgt. Ryan said, “and sit down.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “BEEP BEEP”

  (The Playmates, #4 Billboard, 1958)

  In the living room of Susan’s apartment, in the halfhearted yellowish illumination of a secondhand floor lamp with a threadbare shade, Joy settled uneasily down on a sagging blue sofa. Sgt. Ryan took the worn gray arm chair across from her, sitting on its edge, his expression that of a priest doing his best to explain God’s role in a meaningless, malicious world.

  Leaning forward, elbows resting on the knees of his blue suit pants, hands together as if in prayer, Ryan told her—as gently as possible—that Susan’s body had been found in the trunk of her car Sunday afternoon along a remote stretch of highway leading to Bakersfield.

  She had been strangled.

  Susan’s purse, he said, minus any wallet, was found in the front seat; but a prescription bottle bearing her name, and that of a physician, a Doctor Vernon Green—to whom Ryan had placed a call in Beverly Hills—had led him here, to Susan’s apartment.

  Joy, tears sliding slowly down her cheeks, informed the detective about Susan’s Saturday night date.

  “She met him on the Internet,” Joy said, sniffling, digging for a Kleenex in her purse. “I warned her to be careful. Tried to, anyway...”

  “You need something...?”

  “No,” she said, finding the tissue. She wiped her face with it, adding bitterly, “This Internet ‘friend’—he’s your killer.”

  Ryan reached in his jacket pocket and brought out a small spiral notepad, flipped it open. “Paul Kundell. Works in a strip-mall computer store—assistant manager.”

  That perked her up, just a little—not that justice, speedy or otherwise, would do Susan any good. “You’ve found him already?”

  “He notified the highway patrol early Sunday morning,” Ryan explained. “In fact, he was the reason we knew your friend was missing. Kundell said a woman he was supposed to be meeting hadn’t shown up...that she was driving a red early-’90s Hyundai and he was afraid it might have broken down...”

  “Sounds to me like he was covering his tracks—trying to look good in your eyes—”

  Ryan shook his head. “I wish it were that easy. I’ve already spoken at length with Mr. Kundell, and everything he says checks out. At this juncture, at least, we don’t consider him involved. But we’re checking him and his background in depth.”

  Joy, dismayed by this apparent dead end, thinking she would have to get Jack involved, stammered, “Th-then...then what happened to Susan?”

  Ryan shrugged with his eyebrows. “Highway robbery,” he said.

  The term sounded silly to her; childish. This is highway robbery! the childhood phrase cried out to her, mockingly.

  Ryan was saying, “A woman, alone, in the wrong place at the wrong time...happens all too frequently.”

  “She wasn’t raped?”

  “No. No signs of sexual assault whatever.”

  Joy sighed, shaking her head. “Susan couldn’t have been carrying much money.”

  “Do you know that for a fact, Ms. Lerner?”

  “Yes.” But she didn’t explain why. “Sergeant, something’s wrong here...puzzling. Why would any thief bother to stop a cruddy little car like hers? My Jaguar I could understand.”

  “Now you’re trying to make sense out of a senseless act of random violence,” he said, with a faint, weary smile.

  He had a point. She remembered those three women on a sightseeing excursion to Yosemite, brutally murdered, bodies stuffed in the trunk of their car, vehicle set on fire....

  “Does it matter, Ms. Lerner, whether it was a junkie needing fix money, or some pervert who gets off on hating women?”

  “Only if knowing that helps you find who did it.”

  “That’s exactly right. Now—do you know of any family I can contact?”

  Joy shook her head. “She didn’t have anyone.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes.” At least, no family that would be able to recognize the “new” Susan. “I’m familiar with her job application, after all, as her boss.”

  There was no reason to bring up the fake husband and sons.

  “And you were friends?”

  “And we were friends.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, Ms. Lerner...you mentioned your Jaguar yourself, and I can see how you’re dressed...and I see how Ms. Henderson lived. What turned your boss/secretary relationship into a friendship? What could you have had in common with the murder victim?”

  Joy hesitated.

  Finally, she said, “We liked the same music.”

  Ryan considered that for a moment, then shrugged.

  A stray thought sent a sudden chill through Joy. She leaned forward on the couch. “I...I won’t have to identify Susan, will I?”

  The idea of having to look at her secretary’s stiff toe-tagged corpse on a cold steel autopsy tray, or pulled out in a refrigerated vault, black rubber sheet yanked back, made Joy’s stomach twitch nastily.

  “I just couldn’t handle that,” she sa
id pleadingly, “I really just couldn’t....”

  Ryan shook his head. “Her doctor’s already taken care of that.”

  The baby-faced Dr. Green; she wondered if that blank face had registered anything approaching sorrow....

  Still, Joy had to sigh in relief; the dead image of Susan would have forever eclipsed the live one in her memory.

  Ryan was standing. “We may need to talk again,” the detective said, handing her a business card.

  Joy gave him a card of her own, and told him her home phone number, which he jotted onto it.

  “I’m very sorry about your friend,” Ryan said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Sorry about before—startling you.” He nodded toward his business card, which she was holding by the fingers of both hands, as if it were a much larger, weightier object. “If you think of anything else....” His words trailed off.

  She wondered how many times in his career he had said that.

  Leaving the detective behind, Joy exited the apartment, moving on rubbery legs, passing the scum-surfaced pool where little twigs and dead leaves floated. As she went out the iron gate, she turned and looked back. The light remained on in Susan’s place, as if someone were living there, and not just a cop searching the place for clues, for reasons, why someone might have wanted to murder a good-hearted, innocent soul like Susan Henderson.

  Numbly, Joy returned to her car, dusk descending. Magic hour, the movie business called it. But with her friend and coworker gone, Joy could see nothing very fucking magical about it, at the moment.

  She turned the ignition on and slowly eased her Jaguar out into the street. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but knew she didn’t want to go home. She drove aimlessly, swept along with the other cars, letting them dictate her path, until she found herself back in Beverly Hills.

  Jack! She’d forgotten about him. He could well be back by now. She used her car phone to try his number, but only got his machine; this was his office number, which he checked fairly regularly, but she left no message. She felt like driving, like doing something, so that was where she’d go...to his house. If he wasn’t back from the airport yet, she would wait.