Dark Rivers of the Heart (23 page)

Bosley Donner’s left leg slipped off the foot brace on his electric wheelchair and scraped along the walkway. Laughing, letting his chair coast to a halt, Donner lifted his unfeeling leg with both hands and slammed it back where it belonged.

Equipped with a high-capacity battery and a golf-cart propulsion system, Donner’s transportation was capable of considerably greater speeds than any ordinary electric wheelchair. Roy Miro caught up with him, breathing heavily.

“I told you this baby can
move,
” Donner said.

“Yes. I see. Impressive,” Roy puffed.

They were in the backyard of Donner’s four-acre estate in Bel Air, where a wide ribbon of brick-colored concrete had been installed to allow the disabled owner to access every corner of his elaborately landscaped property. The walkway rose and fell repeatedly, passed through a tunnel under one end of the pool patio, and serpentined among phoenix palms, queen palms, king palms, huge Indian laurels, and melaleucas in their jackets of shaggy bark. Evidently, Donner had designed the walkway to serve as his private roller coaster.

“It’s illegal, you know,” Donner said.

“Illegal?”

“It’s against the law to modify a wheelchair the way I’ve done.”

“Well, yes, I can see why it would be.”

“You can?” Donner was amazed. “I can’t. It’s
my
chair.”

“Whipping around this track the way you do, you could wind up not just a paraplegic but a quadriplegic.”

Donner grinned and shrugged. “Then I’d computerize the chair so I could operate it with vocal commands.”

At thirty-two, Bosley Donner had been without the use of his legs for eight years, after taking a chunk of shrapnel in the spine during a Middle East police action that had involved the unit of U.S. Army Rangers in which he had served. He was stocky, deeply tanned, with brush-cut blond hair and blue-gray eyes that were even merrier than Roy’s. If he’d ever been depressed about his disability, he had gotten over it long ago—or maybe he’d learned to hide it well.

Roy disliked the man because of his extravagant lifestyle, his annoyingly high spirits, his unspeakably garish Hawaiian shirt—and for other reasons not quite definable. “But is this recklessness socially responsible?”

Donner frowned with confusion, but then his face brightened. “Oh, you mean I might be a burden to society. Hell, I’d never use government health care anyway. They’d triage me into the grave in six seconds flat. Look around, Mr. Miro. I can pay what’s necessary. Come on, I want to show you the temple. It’s really something.”

Rapidly gaining speed, Donner streaked away from Roy, downhill through feathery palm shadows and spangles of red-gold sunshine.

Straining to repress his annoyance, Roy followed.

After being discharged from the army, Donner had fallen back on a lifelong talent for drawing inventive cartoon characters. His portfolio had won him a job with a greeting card company. In his spare time, he developed a comic strip and was offered a contract by the first newspaper syndicate to see it. Within two years, he was the hottest cartoonist in the country. Now, through those widely loved cartoon characters—which Roy found idiotic—Bosley Donner was an industry: best-selling books, TV shows, toys, T-shirts, his own line of greeting cards, product endorsements, records, and much more.

At the bottom of a long slope, the walkway led to a balustraded garden temple in the classical style. Five columns stood on a limestone floor, supporting a heavy cornice and a dome with a ball finial. The structure was surrounded by English primrose laden with blossoms in intense shades of yellow, red, pink, and purple.

Donner sat in his chair, in the center of the open-air temple, swathed in shadows, waiting for Roy. In that setting, he should have been a mysterious figure; however, his stockiness and broad face and brush-cut hair and loud Hawaiian shirt all combined to make him seem like one of his own cartoon characters.

Stepping into the temple, Roy said, “You were telling me about Spencer Grant.”

“Was I?” Donner said with a note of irony.

In fact, for the past twenty minutes, while leading Roy on a chase around the estate, Donner had said quite a lot about Grant—with whom he had served in the Army Rangers—and yet had said nothing that revealed either the inner man or any important details of his life prior to joining the army.

“I liked Hollywood,” Donner said. “He was the quietest man I’ve ever known, one of the most polite, one of the smartest—and sure as hell the most self-effacing. Last guy in the world to brag. And he could be a lot of fun when he was in the right mood. But he was very self-contained. No one ever really got to know him.”

“Hollywood?” Roy asked.

“That’s just a name we had for him, when we wanted to kid him. He loved old movies. I mean, he was almost obsessed with them.”

“Any particular kind of movies?”

“Suspense flicks and dramas with old-fashioned heroes. These days, he said, movies have forgotten what heroes are all about.”

“How so?”

“He said heroes used to have a better sense of right and wrong than they do now. He loved
North by Northwest, Notorious, To Kill a Mockingbird,
because the heroes had strong principles, morals. They used their wits more than guns.”

“Now,” Roy said, “you have movies where a couple of buddy cops smash and shoot up half a city to get one bad guy—”

“—use four-letter words, all kinds of trash talk—”

“—jump into bed with women they met only two hours ago—”

“—and strut around with half their clothes off to show their muscles, totally
full
of themselves.”

Roy nodded. “He had a point.”

“Hollywood’s favorite old movie stars were Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, so of course he took a lot of ribbing about that.”

Roy was surprised that his and the scarred man’s opinions of current movies were in harmony. He was disturbed to find himself in agreement on
any
issue with a dangerous sociopath like Grant.

Thus preoccupied, he’d only half heard what Donner had told him. “I’m sorry—took a lot of ribbing about what?”

“Well, it wasn’t particularly funny that Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant must’ve been his mom’s favorite stars too, or that she named him after them. But a guy like Hollywood, as modest and quiet as he was, shy around girls, a guy who didn’t hardly seem to
have
an ego—well, it just struck us funny that he identified so strongly with a couple of movie stars, the heroes they played. He was still nineteen when he went into Ranger training, but in most ways he seemed twenty years older than the rest of us. You could see the kid in him only when he was talking about old movies or watching them.”

Roy sensed that what he had just learned was of great importance—but he didn’t understand why. He stood on the brink of a revelation yet could not quite see the shape of it.

He held his breath, afraid that even exhaling would blow him away from the understanding that seemed within reach.

A warm breeze soughed through the temple.

On the limestone floor near Roy’s left foot, a slow black beetle crawled laboriously toward its own strange destiny.

Then, almost eerily, Roy heard himself asking a question that he had not first consciously considered. “You’re sure his mother named him after Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Donner replied.

“Is it?”

“It is to me.”

“He actually told you that’s why she named him what she did?”

“I guess so. I don’t remember. But he must have.”

The soft breeze soughed, the beetle crawled, and a chill of enlightenment shivered through Roy.

Bosley Donner said, “You haven’t seen the waterfall yet. It’s terrific. It’s really, really neat. Come on, you’ve got to see it.”

The wheelchair purred out of the temple.

Roy turned to watch between the limestone columns as Donner sped recklessly along another down-sloping pathway into the cool shadows of a green glen. His brightly patterned Hawaiian shirt seemed to flare with fire when he flashed through shafts of red-gold sunshine, and then he vanished past a stand of Australian tree ferns.

By now Roy understood the primary thing about Bosley Donner that so annoyed him: The cartoonist was just too damned self-confident and independent. Even disabled, he was utterly self-possessed and self-sufficient.

Such people were a grave danger to the system. Civil order was not sustainable in a society populated by rugged individualists. The dependency of the people was the source of the state’s power, and if the state didn’t have enormous power, progress could not be achieved or peace sustained in the streets.

He might have followed Donner and terminated him in the name of social stability, lest others be inspired by the cartoonist’s example, but the risk of being observed by witnesses was too great. A couple of gardeners were at work on the grounds, and Mrs. Donner or a member of the household staff might be looking out a window at the most inconvenient of all moments.

Besides, chilled and excited by what he believed he’d discovered about Spencer Grant, Roy was eager to confirm his suspicion.

He left the temple, being careful not to crush the slow black beetle, and turned in the opposite direction from that in which Donner had vanished. He swiftly ascended to higher levels of the backyard, hurried past the side of the enormous house, and got in his car, which was parked in the circular driveway.

From the manila envelope that Melissa Wicklun had given him, he withdrew one of the pictures of Grant and put it on the seat. But for the terrible scar, that face initially had seemed quite ordinary. Now he knew that it was the face of a monster.

From the same envelope, he took a printout of the report that he’d requested from Mama the previous night and that he’d read off the computer screen in his hotel a few hours ago. He paged to the false names under which Grant had acquired and paid for utilities.

Stewart Peck

Henry Holden

James Gable

John Humphrey

William Clark

Wayne Gregory

Robert Tracy

Roy withdrew a pen from his inside jacket pocket and rearranged first and last names into a new list of his own:

Gregory Peck

William Holden

Clark Gable

James Stewart

John Wayne

That left Roy with four names from the original list: Henry, Humphrey, Robert, and Tracy.

Tracy, of course, matched the bastard’s first name—Spencer. And for a purpose that neither Mama nor Roy had yet discovered, the tricky, scarfaced son of a bitch was probably using another false identity that incorporated the name Cary, which was missing from the first list but was the logical match for his last name—Grant.

That left Henry, Humphrey, and Robert.

Henry. No doubt Grant sometimes operated under the name Fonda, perhaps with a first name lifted from Burt Lancaster or Gary Cooper.

Humphrey. In some circle, somewhere, Grant was known as Mr. Bogart—first name courtesy of yet another movie star of yesteryear.

Robert. Eventually they were certain to find that Grant also employed the surname Mitchum or Montgomery.

As casually as other men changed shirts, Spencer Grant changed identities.

They were searching for a phantom.

Although he couldn’t yet prove it, Roy was now convinced that the name Spencer Grant was as phony as all the others. Grant was not the surname that this man had inherited from his father, nor was Spencer the Christian name that his mother had given him. He had named himself after favorite actors who had played old-fashioned heroes.

His real name was cipher. His real name was mystery, shadow, ghost, smoke.

Roy picked up the computer-enhanced portrait and studied the scarred face.

This dark-eyed cipher had joined the army under the name Spencer Grant, when he was just eighteen. What teenager knew how to establish a false identity, with convincing credentials, and get away with it? What had this enigmatic man been running from at even that young age?

How in the
hell
was he involved with the woman?