Moonbird Boy (6 page)

"You're pathetic," Darcy had answered, "but you're not as bad as most."

He figured she was right. And they'd both settled for that, years ago. She loved the ranch he'd bought her near Santa Fe, and she'd raised three great kids there. Now that one was on his own and the other two in college, Darcy had gone back to school for some accounting classes and started a travel consulting business with a friend. They spent their time checking out resort accommodations for business meetings and seemed to be having a ball.

She knew what he did when he was out of town. She'd always known, had left him a couple of times because of it. Eventually she decided to stay with him anyway, under two conditions—that he only whore around away from home and that he never approach her side of their king-sized bed without a condom. He'd agreed to both conditions. He loved her.

Tabitha or whoever was half dressed when he came out of the bathroom.

"Bob, sweetie, listen," she smiled over a delectable shoulder, "I've got an eight o'clock class, so I'm gonna pass on breakfast, okay?"

"Take a cab," he agreed, scooping some bills from his wallet and tucking them into her purse on the dresser. "On me."

"You're a doll," she said. "And last night was terrific."

At the door she turned to give him a wink, and then was gone.

He'd put five hundred-dollar bills in her purse, three more than the expected gratuity. Guilt money. She was younger than his daughter.

From items hidden in his suitcase he selected a can of vanilla-flavored Ensure, popped the tab and poured it into an ice-filled glass. The stuff was horrible but full of vitamins and easy to keep down. Then he found the prescription pills designed to stop the cramps and diarrhea that always followed if he drank too much. After swallowing the pill with the thick, white liquid, he pulled on a jockstrap, skimpy athletic shorts, and a T-shirt.

He couldn't work out at the moment if somebody paid him a million bucks, but when you were working a conference it was smart to be seen in the hotel gym early in the morning. Usually only a few women would be there, using the exercycles. Maybe a couple of guys if there were weights or a banked running track. Nobody talked much, but the image was reinforced. Bob Thompson, a disciplined man who's up at dawn safeguarding his health. The sort of man people trust. With their money.

This Houston conference was fairly small potatoes. Pharmaceutical company managers jockeying for job offers. A few heavy-hitters, officers of the big companies, in and out as speakers but not conference participants. Thompson, as MedNet's public information officer, had arranged the usual discreet "hospitality suite" on Friday night when everybody was fresh. Complimentary drinks, hors d'oeuvres, and conservatively dressed call girls from one of Houston's best services. Never more than two working the suite at the same time.

At every such occasion he'd stand well away from the expensively designed investment literature placed about the room. When someone inquired, as most had this time, he'd merely gesture at the embossed packets as if he'd forgotten they were there.

"There will probably be some interesting opportunities," he'd mentioned when asked about MedNet's response to its legal situation. "Say, didn't I hear your son's interested in law school? Ethan, isn't it?"

Names. People liked you if you remembered their names. Their wives' names, kids' names, dogs' and cats' names. Bob Thompson had a knack for remembering, but he worked at it, too. Before every conference, every meeting, he reviewed the list of players and brought up their files from his database. Bob Thompson knew when somebody's wife was detoxing at Betty Ford and would just happen to send the kids tickets to the Ice Capades. He knew who got fired, who got hired, and who was supporting the family of a brother in prison for mail fraud.

He judged nobody. He just remembered people and made sure they remembered him. Bob Thompson liked people, and they repaid him with their business. Investments. He was MedNet's secret weapon, and he didn't like what Alexander Morley was doing. He didn't like it because he didn't know what it was.

The old man, Thompson thought as he pushed open the glass doors of the hotel gym, was making mistakes. Hiring an unknown to negotiate this Indian deal was a mistake. MedNet didn't contract with people Bob Thompson didn't know. MedNet had never done that in the fifteen years he'd been there.

Nodding to the controller of a solid Midwestern company whose portfolio he was about to seduce away from French cancer research, Bob Thompson sat on the carpeted floor. Then he began an elaborate series of warm-up stretches that would forestall actual exercise. A woman account exec from a Dallas company smiled from her exercycle. Her company was about to be bought by a diversifying food chain that would, Thompson knew, mismanage it to death within a year.

"Ride 'em, cowboy!" He smiled back.

But Alexander Morley was on his mind. The old man was up to something, and Bob Thompson wanted to know what it was. This Indian psychiatric deal was a stroke of genius, but why had an outsider been brought in to nail it? Henderson, Morley had said. A negotiator named Henderson.

Bob Thompson never forgot a name that was worth remembering. And he'd never heard of a negotiator named Henderson.

The new haircut, Bo decided on Friday morning as she stared groggily into the bathroom mirror of her Ocean Beach apartment, was either hideous or a refreshing fashion statement. The short curls framing her face and neck seemed embarrassingly youthful, even wholesome in a rakish sort of way. Like the hair of a woman whose bath soap, if sliced in half, would produce cartoon bluebirds doing a medley of tunes from The Sound of Music. The image was unnerving, but short hair would be less of a hassle during the tail end of the depression, in which everything continued to be a hassle.

On the floor of the bedroom closet she found the laundry basket of clean but unironed clothes and grabbed a pleated white blouse. Unworn since the last time she'd ironed it over a year ago. Wrestling the ironing board from its clamps in the hall closet, Bo paused to wonder why she was bothering. It had something to do with white, she decided. "Chinese white mourning," like Emily Dickinson. With a long white duck skirt she'd bought for its row of tiny buttons down one side and then never worn, the pleated blouse would look appropriately austere. And a white ensemble would covertly honor the deaths of both Mildred and Mort Wagman while reinforcing the clean-cut image bequeathed by short hair. She wondered what Dickinson had done about accessories.

"Madre de dios!" Estrella exclaimed an hour later as Bo opened the door to their shared office at San Diego County's Child Protective Services. "You look like a nun."

Bo switched on her desk lamp. "They said that about Emily Dickinson, too."

Estrella's dark eyes widened in alarm. Actually in panic, Bo thought.

"Bo, it's too soon for you to come back to work," Estrella said. "I knew it yesterday when you were in such a rush to get your hair repaired. Look, I know you want to help Mort's little boy, but why don't you just let me do that while you... you know, stabilize for a few more days?"

"Stabilize?" Bo repeated dramatically, pushing her dark glasses down her nose in order to glare over them. "If I were any more 'stable' I'd have to become a right-wing religious fanatic with a petition to abolish votes for women. Surely you don't want that."

"No," Estrella agreed. Her manicured fingers drummed thoughtfully on her abdomen. "The baby can't have a right-wing godmother."

"There you have it then. So who got Bird's case?"

The little office felt at once familiar and hostile, Bo noticed. As if the walls and utilitarian furnishings had taken her absence personally and were at best ambivalent about her return. The awareness, if permitted to expand, could become paranoia. But the medications would control that, Bo reassured herself. In the meantime she rearranged items on her desk with large and proprietary movements, dramatizing for the furniture her right to be there.

"You're in luck; it's Nick Paratore," Estrella answered. "The case file's on his desk across the hall, but he isn't in yet."

Bo sank into her swivel chair with a determined smile. Things were falling into place. "Does Madge know anything about Mort, about Bird and his dad being at Ghost Flower with me?" she asked. If their supervisor, Madge Aldenhoven, knew anything of the connection there would be no chance of getting the case. It was a flat rule that investigators with any connection whatever to a child could not investigate that child's case. Not that it mattered in this situation, Bo thought. There were no allegations of child abuse, just a need to locate the family. No conflict of interest.

Estrella stood and faced the window as if modeling her layered maroon knit maternity ensemble for the eucalyptus tree outside. "Bird's file says he was picked up from Ghost Flower Lodge after the death of his father," she answered slowly. "Does Madge know that's where you were?"

Bo remembered an absence of get-well cards from her supervisor during her recuperation, a complete dearth of concerned phone calls. "Not unless you told her."

Estrella adjusted a carved wooden comb in her upswept hair and then sighed. "She didn't ask."

"Well, then," Bo grinned, rubbing her palms together, "where's Nick?"

"At a save the sharks demonstration," Estrella whispered, eyeing the door as if Madge Aldenhoven were glued to its other side. "You know how he's into diving and snorkeling and all that? Well, after the death of that woman yesterday, shark-hunters descended on San Diego in droves. And this marine life protection group Nick's in—it's called Scales of Justice if you can believe that—is sponsoring a demonstration against the big hunt that's going out this morning. Nick and the others are in the water in wetsuits waving white flags at boatloads of heavily armed shark haters. He told Madge he had to go to the dentist."

"What does Nick's group think..." Bo began and then stopped as the door swooped open, propelled by Madge Aldenhoven in an astonishing navy silk blouse with huge white polka dots. The blouse's floppy bow completed a look Bo associated with clowns.

"I see you're back early," Madge addressed a space two inches to the left of Bo's broad grin. "And dressed as a bride. No doubt this has something to do with your illness and so everyone is expected to ignore it. But most people don't wear white after Labor Day, Bo. Surely you'd be more comfortable if you made some attempt to fit in."

Bo couldn't stop envisioning Madge in a sawdust ring, juggling bowling pins. "The Labor Day rule doesn't apply in the tropics," she replied. "Everyone in Boston knew that when I was a kid."

Madge Aldenhoven sighed and handed a case file to Estrella. "Hand-shaped bruises on the baby and the three-year-old sister has worms as well as lice," she outlined the case. "Reporting party is a barrio priest. There won't be any problem getting the petition. And Bo..." she glowered levelly through contact lenses tinted to make her blue eyes violet, "... this isn't the tropics. You'll get the next case that comes up. Don't go anywhere."

Bo saw her chance. "I thought I'd take the free time to do a little decorating in here," she said. "Maybe redo my bulletin board, change the plants around, you know."

Madge believed in sterile work spaces, almost as zealously as she believed in the Protestant work ethic. It was rumored that even plastic plants died in her office.

"Nick is at the dentist," Madge said with sudden purpose, grabbing a pen lodged in her flyaway white hair and pointing it at Bo, "so you might as well take his new case. It's a six-year-old boy whose father was accidentally shot up in the desert near Campo. If you can find the mother or some other family before the weekend we can close it without involving juvenile court. The file's on Nick's desk. Let me know by this afternoon what you turn up. Your hair, by the way, looks much better short."

When the door had slammed shut after Madge, Bo looked at Estrella. "Accidentally?" she said. "Mort wasn't shot accidentally, he was murdered!"

"You don't know that. It might have been an accident, Bo." The word was pronounced "bean," a sure sign of anxiety. Estrella's Spanish accent always escalated with her stress level. Bo experienced a warm flutter of neck muscles. Guilt. She hadn't meant to upset her best friend.

"You're right," she admitted. "And I know taking this case is pretty dumb, but I want to do it for Mort." Striding the two steps necessary to cross the tiny room, Bo hooked both thumbs in the waist of her skirt and stared into a spindly bottlebrush shrub beneath the window. "He was... really close to me."

Estrella feigned interest in the case file on her desk. "Andy will be back from Europe in a week," she mentioned. "I hope you and Mort didn't get, you know, too close." Estrella's vision of Andrew LaMarche escorting Bo to an altar had reached obsessive proportions.

"Our favorite pediatrician," Bo answered, "has not been supplanted in my dubious affections or my bed, if that's what you're asking, and it is what you're asking. When Andy heard I was in the hospital he wanted to cancel that training program on child abuse prevention on foreign U.S. military bases he's doing for the government, but there was really no point. I wanted him to stay in Frankfurt. He's sent flowers every other day. Also an enormous cuckoo clock, three pairs of kid gloves I'll never wear unless I move back to Boston, and an illustrated strudel cookbook in German. My relationship with Mort Wagman was different. We were friends."

Estrella was pensive. "Maybe in a place like that, where everybody's just trying to get on their feet, that could happen," she mused. "I still don't really understand what Ghost Flower Lodge is, to be honest. And what are you going to do with a German cookbook?"

"I thought I'd run an ad on Craigslist for a German cook," Bo answered. "And Ghost Flower Lodge is a subacute psychiatric facility, like a rehabilitation center, the only one of its kind. The Neji started taking in people with chronic psychiatric illnesses years ago. It's a special purpose they have, a tradition. Now famous people go up there to rehab after a hospitalization or a medication change. Movie stars, pro sports types, everybody." Bo unbuttoned the cuffs of her blouse and rolled up the sleeves, creating wrinkles. It felt better.