Double Image (52 page)

“As much as the investigator could determine, nothing happened in San Diego. He thinks she’s planning to keep it uncontaminated. A home base. But Malibu was another matter. Melinda Chance or Tash Adler or whatever you want to call her was up to her old tricks — with a new variation that added more excitement. She pretended to be stalked so she could have policemen around her, big men with big guns, whom she would manipulate to fight over her.”

“Pretended to?” Coltrane said. “No, you don’t understand. Duncan Reynolds was in fact stalking her. He—” Instantly, another piece of the puzzle slid horrifyingly into place. “Jesus, he
wasn’t
stalking her. He was her
accomplice
. He was doing what Tash asked him to do so the police would believe she was being threatened and she could manipulate her bodyguards until they turned on one another. That explains how Duncan knew about the photographs I took of him. Tash is the only one who could have told him. She must have ordered him to take the evidence and cover her tracks. And then—”

“What’s the matter?”

“What
else
was stolen?” Coltrane sprang to his feet.

AS COLTRANE SCRAMBLED DOWN THE STAIRS, he heard Jennifer running after him. Frantic, he reached the vault, unlocked it, and charged inside. He flicked at the light switch without stopping, raced past the shelves, reached the false wall in the far left corner, and shivered from more than the vault’s chill when he stooped to free the catches and pull out the wall.

Behind him, Jennifer’s heels sounded urgently on the concrete floor, but his attention was totally directed toward the hidden chamber, the vault’s glaring overhead lights making him squint toward the shadows in there.

“She’s gone.” His voice broke.

Rebecca Chance’s face no longer peered out at him. The life-sized photograph of her haunting features no longer hung on the back wall of the chamber. He took a half step back, as if he’d been pushed, then moaned and lurched into the chamber, knowing what he wouldn’t find but needing to search anyhow. The effort was worthless. The chamber was empty. Every box of photographs had been removed.

Coltrane spun toward Jennifer. “Duncan didn’t know about this chamber. Tash must have told him. Jesus.” Feeling off balance, he groped for a shelf. “When I confronted her in Big Bear, she denied knowing anything about the negatives
or
Duncan. It didn’t make sense. Why would she lie? So I drove to Duncan’s house in Newport Beach to confront
him
. Too late. Several days ago, he shot himself.”

“Duncan?” Jennifer turned pale. “Why would he . . .”

“Maybe Tash helped him along, the way we assume she helped two of her old boyfriends along. One less piece of evidence, one less person who knew the truth.”

The implications reduced them to stunned silence.

“What about the last names she used? Tell me why they’re significant,” Coltrane said.

“Breuer. Erikson. Young. Miller. Adler. In college, before I got into graphic arts, I thought about a career in psychology. I took a lot of classes in it. The names Erikson and Adler had a lot of associations when I saw them together. That made me think about the other names. They all fit. Every one of them is a famous psychotherapist. Breuer and Adler were colleagues of Freud. Adler was one of his disciples.”

“I never heard of a famous psychotherapist called Young.”

“Spell it differently. J-u-n-g. She’s making a joke. Or she chose the names without realizing the connection among them, a subconscious slip. My private investigator found out that, under each of these names, she went to a therapist in each of the cities she lived in.”

“And what about Miller?”

“Alice Miller. The subtitle of one of her books is
Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness
.”

Coltrane’s voice was an uneasy whisper. “Childhood trauma?”

“There’s one other thing I have to tell you.”

“You mean it gets worse?”

“She told you her mother was dead. Well, she’s batting a thousand, because that isn’t true, either.”

IN POINT-AND-SHOOT CAMERAS, the viewfinder and the lens have different openings. As a consequence, the image seen through the viewfinder is not quite the same as that received through the lens and recorded on film, making precise framing difficult. The difference between what the viewfinder sees and what the lens sees is known as the parallax effect, and that is what Coltrane suffered now. What he had thought was happening was so at odds with what had truly been happening that the parallax threatened to drive him insane.

At ten the next morning, after he and Jennifer had caught a 7:00 A.M. flight to Oakland, he walked apprehensively along a corridor in the Redwood Rest Facility. In room after room, aged men and women lay in beds. A recreation room revealed a dozen residents in wheelchairs watching a game show on television. In the hallway, a few residents managed to get around with the aid of walkers. Coltrane nodded respectively to them, then stopped where a white-uniformed male attendant waited outside a room.

The attendant was in his twenties, with wire-rim glasses and his hair tied back in a ponytail. “You’d better prepare yourselves. The odds are, she won’t know you.”

“I don’t expect her to,” Coltrane said. “It’s been years since we met,” he lied. “The last time I saw her was when we lived on the same street in Sacramento. But I have these photographs I took of her daughter.” Coltrane held up a packet. “And when her daughter found out I was coming to Oakland for a photo assignment, she asked me to visit her mother and give these to her.” The camera hanging from Coltrane’s neck gave credence to his story.

“Sometimes her language can be a little frank.”

“No problem. I admire elderly women who speak their mind,” Jennifer said.

“Well, maybe
frank
isn’t the right word,” the attendant said.

Coltrane tilted his head in puzzlement.

“
Shocking
would be more accurate,” the attendant said. “But who knows, you might get lucky and catch her in one of her occasional ladylike moods. The doctor said the photographs you’re bringing might improve her mental outlook. Nothing else has, so let’s hope.” The attendant reached for the doorknob. “Just give me a minute to go in and see that she’s presentable.”

“Take all the time you need,” Coltrane said. While the attendant went in, his apprehension swelled.

“So far so good. The story about the photographs worked,” Jennifer said.

“I wish it hadn’t. I don’t want to go in there.”

The photographs of Tash that Coltrane had brought were from the film he had exposed in Acapulco. He had developed the prints the night before, careful to shield Jennifer from the nudes but inadvertently processing an image that he hadn’t even known he had taken. When Carl Nolan had tried to strangle him with the camera strap, Coltrane had fumbled to attempt to pry the hands away and had accidentally pressed the camera’s shutter button. The resultant image, tilted on a forty-five-degree angle, showed the blur of what might have been the side of a hand on the right and the blur of what was possibly a shoulder on the left. Between them, Tash’s face was distinct. Coltrane had never seen an expression of such animalistic delight. He had almost been embarrassed to look at it, so open was the sexual pleasure that she took from watching Carl and him fight because of her.

The door hissed open, the attendant stepping out. “I can’t tell her mood, but she’s ready to see you.”

Am
I
ready, though? Coltrane asked himself.

After an uncertain glance toward Jennifer, he felt encouraged by the touch of her hand on his arm. He entered the room.

The rest home’s administrator had given Coltrane a sense of what to expect. Even so, he was caught by surprise, faltering as Jennifer closed the door.

“There’s been a mistake. We’re in the wrong room.”

“No mistake,” Jennifer said.

“But . . .” Coltrane stared at the apparently sleeping woman on the bed. “Tash’s mother was born in 1934. Depending on when her birthday is, she’d be sixty-three or sixty-four now. But this woman is—”

“What are you whispering about?” the woman on the bed complained. She sounded as if she had broken glass caught in her throat.

“Sorry,” Coltrane said. “We thought you were asleep. We were trying to decide whether to wake you.”

“You mean you were trying to decide if I was asleep so you could feel me up.”

“Uh . . .” Coltrane lost the power of speech. The woman in the bed, who should have looked in her early sixties, seemed in her nineties: stringy, thinning white hair, rheumy red eyes, shriveled skin, a prematurely shrinking and collapsing body. A scar disfigured each of her cheeks. But the most disturbing aspect about her was that, in spite of all the ravages her body had endured — “From alcohol and drugs,” the administrator had explained — she was recognizably Rebecca Chance’s daughter and Tash’s mother, as if this was how Rebecca Chance would have looked had she lived and led a hard life, or as if this was how Tash was destined to end.

“Go ahead. Feel me up. The attendants do it all the time.” The prematurely old woman pawed at her spiderweb hair, as if combing it.

Coltrane looked at Jennifer, shocked and sickened.

“Stephanie?” Jennifer approached the bed.

“Who the hell are
you
?”

“My name’s Jennifer. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“No women allowed.”

“We brought you some photographs of your daughter.”

“No women allowed.”

“If I leave, do you promise to talk to my friend?”

“Did he come here to . . .”

The suggestion she made turned Coltrane’s stomach sour.

“I’m afraid the attendants wouldn’t like him to do that,” Jennifer said. “They might get angry.”

“Good.”

“They might start a fight.”

“Yes.”

“You enjoy that?”

“Make them fight. They deserve to be punished.”

“Why?”

“For wanting me.”

“Does your daughter like men to fight?”

“The little . . .” The next word was shocking.

“Why do you call her that?”

“Thought she was better than me. Took my men away from me.”

“When she was in college?”

“Hah.”

“In high school?”

“Hah. When I was asleep, she got a razor, snuck up, and did this to my cheeks. Couldn’t stand her momma to get all the attention. Thought she could destroy the competition. Didn’t work. I’m still as beautiful as ever.” She gave Coltrane the most demanding look he had ever received. “Aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Then . . .”

What she said next made Coltrane look away.

“What good are you? Get yourself a new boyfriend, missy. This one can’t cut it. Pictures? Did you say you brought pictures of my daughter?”

“Yes,” Coltrane managed to say.

“Burn them. Send her to hell. And get out of here. Quit wasting my time. I’ve got men lined up waiting to—”

“You’re right,” Coltrane said. “We’re wasting your time. I’m sorry we bothered you.”

ON THE PILLARED STEPS OF THE REST HOME, Coltrane sank and put his head between his knees. It took him several deep breaths before his swirling sensation passed and his stomach became still. From the bay, a salt-laden breeze drifted over him, cooling the sweat on his brow.

Finally he was able to peer up at Jennifer. “You’re the one who took all the psychology courses.”

“It’s called being a sexual predator,” Jennifer said. “In women, it’s very rare.”

“But how did . . .”

“Heredity or environment. Take your pick.”

“Or both. In other words, who knows,” Coltrane said.

“My abnormal-psych prof said that emotional illness can be inherited.” Jennifer eased down next to him, crossing her arms over the knees of her gray slacks. “We don’t know anything about
Rebecca’s
mother, but she and her daughter and her granddaughter are all beautiful women so obsessed with their beauty, so self-conscious and uncomfortable about it, that they feel self-worth only when men fight over them.”

“Or they were all abused as children and they’re so ambivalent about men, so bitter, that they want to punish men for finding them attractive,” Coltrane said.

“Which takes us from heredity to environment. We don’t know how that pathetic woman in there was raised. It could be Winston Case was a monster. But from what she said about the way Tash or Melinda or whatever you want to call her was raised, it’s clear that even as a child, Tash felt jealous about all the men her mother had around her. She needed attention, but since she couldn’t get it from her mother, she got it from her mother’s boyfriends. The trouble is, she may have gotten more attention than she bargained for. If Tash was molested, I’m not surprised that she feels so angry at men now that she’s grown up. On the one hand, she feels compelled to tempt them. On the other hand, she needs to punish them for wanting her. Having sex with her is unforgivable.”

Coltrane felt his cheeks turn warm.

“I have a terrible feeling you’re next on her list of get-evens,” Jennifer said. “But even if you hadn’t had sex with her, you know she was lying about the negatives and Duncan Reynolds. You see through her act, and that puts you in a position to make trouble for her. If she’s true to form, she’ll protect herself by finding a way to get rid of you.”

“Just as she got rid of Duncan and her former boyfriends. That’s what she’s doing with Walt. She’s setting him up to use him against me.”

“We have to warn him.”

“MR. COLTRANE, this is Eliot Blaine,” a concerned voice said from the speaker on Coltrane’s car phone. As soon as he and Jennifer had gotten back to the Los Angeles airport, he had called his home to find out if he had any messages on his answering machine. A series of hang-up calls had troubled him, reminding him of Ilkovic, making him wonder if it was Walt. Then Blaine said, “I’m the attorney for Randolph Packard’s estate. I don’t know if you’ve heard this from another source. If not, forgive me for being the messenger of bad news. I know you spent time with Randolph’s assistant, Duncan Reynolds. He confided to me that he was fond of his chats with you. I’m . . . There’s no easy way to say this. You’ll be as dismayed as
I
was to learn that Duncan’s body was found at his home last evening. Apparently, he’d been dead for several days. The police seem to think he committed . . . It’s more appropriate if we discuss this in person. Please call me at my office. About a week ago, Duncan came to me with a strange request. I respected his privacy and didn’t question him about it, but it now seems obvious that he was taking care of personal matters before . . . I have a package he wanted me to give you in the event of his death.”