Time Bomb (48 page)

“Mr. Crevolin’s in a meeting.”

“When will he be free?”

“I can’t say, sir.”

“I called yesterday. Dr. Alex Delaware? Regarding Ike Novato?”

“I’m sure he got your message, sir.”

“Then how about we try to get his attention with a new message.”

“I don’t really—”

“Tell him Bear Lodge claimed
nine
victims, not
ten
.”

“Barry Lodge?”

“Bear, as in the animal. Lodge as in Henry Cab— as in hunting lodge. Bear Lodge—it’s a place. It claimed
nine
victims.
Not ten.”

“One second,” she said. “I’m still writing.”

“You can also tell him that
apathy
claimed the tenth. Just a few months ago. Apathy and indifference.”

“Apathy and indifference,” she said. “Is this some kind of concept for a script? ’Cause if it is, I know for a fact the season’s completely programmed and it’s really not worth pitching anything until they clear the board for the next sweeps.”

“Not a concept,” I said. “A true story. And it would never play on prime time.”

She called me back an hour later to say “He’ll see you at four,” unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.

At five to four, I walked across a network parking lot crammed with German and Swedish cars. I was wearing a tan gabardine suit and carrying my briefcase. A roving security guard in his seventies took down my name and directed me to a flight of metal stairs that led up to the second floor of the bulky deco building. On the way, I passed a canopied waiting area filled with hundreds of people lined up for tickets to the latest late-night talk show. A few of them rotated their heads to inspect me, decided I was nobody to be concerned with, and turned their attention elsewhere.

At the top of the stairs were double plate-glass doors. The reception area was big as a barn: thirty feet high, walls bare except for a giant reproduction of the network logo on the south side and, just below it, a door marked private. The floor was travertine tile, over which a surprisingly shabby maroon area rug had been laid. In the precise center of the rug was a rectangular glass coffee table. Hard black leather sling chairs ran along both sides. On the far side of the room a young black security guard sat behind a white counter. To his left a white Actionvision monitor played some sort of game show. The sound was off.

I gave him my name. He opened a ledger, ran his finger down a page, turned to the next page, did more finger-walking, stopped, made a call on a white phone, listened, and said, “Uh-huh. Okay, yeah.” To me: “Be a couple of minutes. Whyncha have a seat.”

I tried to get comfortable in the sling chair. The glass table was empty—no magazines, not even an ashtray.

I said, “Nothing to read. That supposed to be a philosophical statement?”

The guard looked over as if noticing that for the first time, chuckled, and returned his attention to the monitor. A hefty woman in a print dress was bouncing up and down, embracing a male host who was trying hard to maintain a blow-dried smile. As the woman continued to hug him, the smile finally faded. The host tried to get loose. She held tight. Colored lights flashed in the background.

The guard saw me looking. “They turn off the sound. Don’t ask me why—I just started. That’s some kind of new show—
Fair Fight
, I think it is. Still trying to figure out exactly what it’s all about. What I
think
it is, is that you got to insult your friends, give away their secrets, in order to answer questions and win the big money.”

The host finally pried himself free of the hefty woman. She started bouncing again. The name tag on her bosom fluttered. Despite her bulk, she was firm as a canned ham. The host smiled again and pointed and said something. In the background a beauty-contest runner-up in a black mini-dress spun something that resembled a bingo bin. The camera closed in on numbers incandescing along a giant roulette wheel rimmed with flashing light bulbs.

The guard studied the screen, squinting. “Tough to know what they’re saying,” he said. “I figure a couple of more weeks on the job and I’ll be able to read lips.”

I settled back and closed my eyes. At four-ten the private door opened and a young woman with strawberry-blond hair stepped out. She wore a sequined red T-shirt over black jeans and had a reluctant, tired smile.

“Dr. Delaware? Terry can see you now.” She gave the door a shove and walked through, leaving me to catch it. Treating walking as if it were an athletic event, she took me past a half-empty secretarial area to a short, bright hallway marked by six or seven doors. The third door was open. She said, “Here,” waited until I went in, and left.

No one was in the office. It was a medium-sized room with an eastern view of more parking lot, tar-paper rooftops, intestinal twists of hammered metal ductwork, and the smog-softened contours of central L.A. The walls were gray grass cloth; the carpeting, tight-nap industrial tinted the dull aqua of a poorly serviced swimming pool. Floating in the center was a clear-plastic desk with matching chair. Perpendicular to the desk was an anorexic couch upholstered in slate-blue tweed. Facing the desk were two blue chairs with chrome legs. Warm and comfy as an operating room.

Three of the gray walls were unadorned. The one behind the desk was filled with color animation celluloids.
Cinderella. Pinocchio. Fantasia.
Given what Judy had told me, I hadn’t expected political posters, but Disney took me by surprise. My gaze lingered on Snow White about to accept a poisoned apple from a gleeful crone.

A man came in, cupping his hand to his mouth and coughing. Forty or close to it, short, with a pallid, soft-featured face under a salt-and-pepper new-wave crew cut stiff with butch wax. One of the faces that had been in the group photo, younger, thinner, long hair. Second row, right, I thought. Shadowed by Norman Green’s towering height.

He stared at me. There were sooty bags under his eyes. A gold stud sparkled in his left ear. He wore a baggy black bomber jacket over a gray silk T-shirt, gray sharkskin trousers with pegged cuffs, black high-top Reeboks.

He sat down. The height of the apple in the Snow White cel was such that it appeared to sit atop his head.

William Tell in Melrose Avenue duds.

He said, “Terry Crevolin.” Incongruous bass voice.

“Alex Delaware.”

“So I’ve been told. Sit.”

As I did, he got up and locked the door. Two silk T-shirts exactly like the one he was wearing hung on dry-cleaner’s hangers from a hook on the back.

He returned to the desk, sifted through papers for a few moments, then said, “Yeah, you look like a doctor. What kind of doctor are you?”

“Psychologist.”

“Psychologist. But you know about what plays in prime time.”

I said, “I know Bear Lodge sure wouldn’t. Too long ago and times have changed. No one cares much about a hunch of radical freaks blowing themselves up.”

One of his eyes twitched. He looked at my briefcase.

We had ourselves a little staring contest. He was pretty good at it—plenty of practice, no doubt, with desperate writers pitching concepts. But I’d sat through tens of thousands of hours of therapy. On the doctor’s side of the couch. Waited out every evasion known to mankind . . .

Finally he said, “I was given the impression you had something for me—a concept. If you do, let’s hear it. If not . . .” Shrug.

“Sure,” I said. “Here’s a concept: adolescent search for identit—”

“It’s been done.”

“Not like this. My protagonist is a bright young kid, orphaned at a very young age. Good-looking, idealistic. Half-black, half-Jewish. His parents are political radicals who die under suspicious circumstances. Seventeen years later he tries to find out how and why. And ends up getting murdered for his efforts—set up in a phony drug bust. Lots of good stuff in between but probably too downbeat, huh?”

Something that could have been pain scuttled across his face. He said, “You’ve lost me.”

“Ike Novato.
Novato
as in Spanish for novice. Novice as in
green.
The little boy who once belonged to Norman and Melba Green.”

Crevolin inspected his nails.

I said, “He tried to see you this past summer, couldn’t get through.”

“Lots of people try to see me.”

“Not about Bear Lodge.”

He peered at a cuticle.

“Do lots of them get murdered, Mr. Crevolin?”

Some color came into his face. “Boy, this sounds pretty dramatic.”

“He was murdered. Check it out for yourself. Last September. Drug deal gone wrong down in Watts. Funny thing is, though, people who know him say he never used drugs, had no reason to go to Watts.”

“People,” he said. “There’s no way to know someone—to really know what goes on in someone’s head. Especially a kid, right? The whole kick about being young is keeping secrets, right? Creating your own private world and keeping everyone else out of it. If you’re really a shrink you should know that.”

“Ike Novato’s secrets were dangerous,” I said. “They may have killed him. And his grandmother too. An old woman who lived in Venice named Sophie Gruenberg.”

His mouth opened, then closed.

I said, “She disappeared a few days after he was killed. The police think someone disappeared her. They’ve got no leads, can’t seem to connect any of it, think maybe there’s a dope connection. But I’ll just bet they’d love to talk to you.”

He said, “Oh, shit.”

I said, “Gruenberg to Green. Green to Novato. The family had a thing for name changes, but they kept the hue consistent. When did Norman Green change his?”

“He didn’t. His old man did. For business. The father was bourgeois; the mother didn’t approve of the name change. After the old man died, she changed it back.”

“But Norm didn’t?”

“No. He liked the old man. Politically, he saw eye to eye with his mother. But she was hard to get along with. Abrasive. Emotionally, she and Norm weren’t close.”

His nostrils flared and closed. He rolled his lips over his teeth, chewed on a pinkie. “Listen, I’m sorry to hear all this. What’s it got to do with me?”

Bad bluffer. Pinocchio would have laughed and lent him his nose.

I said, “I think you know. One family destroyed—three generations exterminated, because the wrong people got asked the wrong questions. Asking you might have been safer, but Ike couldn’t get through.”

He waved a hand frantically. “Don’t lay that on me.”

“You’re laying it on yourself. You’ve never forgotten Bear Lodge. That’s why you agreed to see me.”

He slumped, ran his fingers through his spiky hair, checked the time on a wristwatch thin enough to fit through a coin slot.

I said, “Getting his message last summer brought back those memories full force. You probably considered seeing him. Your idealism may be long-buried under a heap of game shows but—”

He sat up. “I don’t do game shows.”

“—you’re still a person of principles. Or so it’s been suggested.”

“Yeah? By who?”

“Judy Baumgartner at the Holocaust Center. She says you helped them get that documentary produced. She’s the one who told me about your book.”

His expression turned sour. He pulled something out of his jacket pocket. An orange lollipop that he unwrapped with stealth and haste, as if it were a forbidden pleasure. He jammed it in his mouth, sat back, hands folded across his belly, pacified.

“Principles, huh?”

“Why’d you turn him down?” I said. “Too painful opening old wounds? Or was it just inertia? All those meetings you take every day, you simply didn’t have the energy to handle another one?”

He yanked out the lollipop, started to say something, gagged on it, and stood up, turning his back to me. He faced the rear wall, taking in his cartoon buddies.

I said, “Fairy godmothers and glass slippers. Would that life were so simple.”

“You with the government?” he said.

“No.”

“Show me some ID.”

I took my driver’s license, psychology license, and medical school affiliation out of my wallet and handed them to him. “Got major credit cards, too, if you want to see them.”

He turned around, examined them, gave them back. “Doesn’t really mean anything, does it? You could be who the papers say you are and still be government.”

“I could but I’m not.”

He shrugged. “And what if you are? Like you said, times have changed—no one cares anymore. What’s my crime? Shifting gears into a survival mode? What’s the penalty gonna be? Working at another network?”

I smiled. “How about working with game shows?”

He leaned forward. “Come on, level with me. What’s this really about?”

“It’s about what I told you. I want to ask you some of the questions Ike Novato never got to ask.”

“Why? What’s your connection to him? Were you his shrink?”

“No. I never met him. But I’ve been looking into the death of one of his friends. A young girl named Holly Burden.”

I waited for a sign of recognition, got none.

I said, “Her family asked me to do a psychological autopsy. To try to understand why she died. That led me to Ike. He was one of the few friends she’d had. A confidant. I traced him back to the Holocaust Center, some books he checked out on racism. He’d written your name and number in a margin. Judy was certain he hadn’t met you there, thought he might have tried to reach you because of your previous life.”

I opened the briefcase and pulled out his book. “I bought this today, read the Bear Lodge story and saw the Berkeley picture. Figured out who Ike really was.”

He sat down, put the lollipop back in his mouth and withdrew it quickly, as if it had lost its flavor. “Some literary masterpiece, huh? I was coming down from acid and mushrooms and Methedrine chasers when I wrote that. Flashing back and seeing God. One superstoked weekend, no revisions. I didn’t even come up for air. Pulitzer Prize stuff, it ain’t.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” I said. “It had a certain raw energy. Passion. The kind you probably don’t experience much anymore.”

“Look,” he said, stiffening, “if you think you’re going to come in here and lay all this guilt on me—for surviving—forget it. I’ve worked that through. With my own
psychologist.”