“Well, I shouldn’t have snapped because I still want you to tell me what you think. I don’t want you holding back about her, just to avoid offending me.”
“Sounds like you love her but you’re conflicted.”
“‘Conflicted’ is one word for it.”
“Maybe you don’t need to be. I didn’t call you just to report on that charming vial-of-blood necklace. Pazia made me call you about something else.”
“How did she like Le Coucou, by the way?”
“Loved it. I am her hero. But even heroes do stupid things. I told you to dump this Maddison and use an online dating service—or join a monastery. Pazia says I was wrong, and I think she’s right. I don’t even know your girl. Listen, the world is going to hell. Maybe it’s always been going to hell, but it’s sliding down faster on a steeper slope than before. There’s so much insanity these days, so much hatred and violence. The internet, social media, seems like a poison that makes some people crazy, it’s all about power, everyone wanting to tell everyone else what to think, how to live. It won’t end well. If you’ve got a chance at happiness with this Maddison, then, by God, grab it. We don’t get that chance so often that we can afford to turn down something good with the hope something perfect is right around the corner. Not that this gorgeous girl of yours isn’t perfect. I’m sure she’s perfect. Don’t take my head off.”
Even in his loneliness and confusion and simmering fear, David found a laugh. “That was quite a speech.”
“A private dick is supposed to be a strong, silent type, as terse as a Mickey Spillane character. But when you’re married long enough to a psychiatrist, you start babbling like a therapist and philosopher. I love Pazia, she’s a peach, but she’ll eventually ruin my business.”
“So what about the pendant? Ever see anything like it?”
“Where did you find it? Who does it belong to?”
“It belongs to me now,” David lied. “I saw it in a thrift shop, and I thought there has to be a story in it, maybe something I can write.”
“Who runs this thrift shop? Satan? There’s a South American gang, as violent as MS-13, their motto is ‘rape, rob, and kill for justice.’ Each of them wears blood from his first victim. But this isn’t that. The chain’s too girly. Only guys allowed in this gang, and they put the blood in an empty rifle cartridge and seal it, not in a glass ampule.”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“Believe it or not, neither Cartier nor Tiffany has a line of blood jewelry. Back in the day, there were those two movie stars, Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie, they wore little vials of each other’s blood on pendants, but for some reason the marriage didn’t last. Maybe you’ve found a genuine Hollywood treasure.”
David glanced at his wristwatch. “I’ve got an appointment. But I’ll look forward to coming back to New York and kicking your ass all the way to Gramercy Tavern.”
As he terminated the call, the elusive memory wimpled through the deeper waters of his mind, the incident that he couldn’t quite recall and that somehow seemed related to the pendant hanging above Maddison’s bed.
He pushed aside the page proofs and carried his empty coffee mug to the kitchen and washed it and put it away.
He tucked his suitcase in the car and drove to John Wayne Airport to catch the commuter flight to Sacramento.
On takeoff, when the tarmac dropped away, a quiver of dread passed through him, and he thought perhaps he would never walk the earth again.
Though alive on touchdown in Sacramento, he felt insubstantial, as if chasing after ghosts might be wearing him away, until soon he would be a mere spirit.
In the rental car, on his way from Sacramento International to his hotel, he wanted to reverse course, fly south, return home, and live in the quiet behind the pleated shades of his sweet bungalow, where the madness of the world would not intrude, and wait for her to call him, if she ever did.
He did not want to go to Folsom in the morning. He did not want to talk with Ronny Lee Jessup. He did not want to go down among the fourteen stolen girls, wherever they might be. What he didn’t want didn’t matter. That very descent had been his destiny for ten years.
| 63 |
The table and benches were bolted to the floor, as if David’s eerie sense of reality warping around him had become manifest, the laws of physics inverted, so that the furniture might float to the ceiling. Bear-big gentle-looking Ronny Lee Jessup, with his ever-warm smile and honey-brown eyes glimmering with plush-toy sympathy, sat shackled to a bench and cuffed to a steel ring in the apron of the table, as if some grave injustice had cast into prison an innocent host of a Saturday morning TV show for children. The armed guard watched from behind a windowed door.