Flesh and Blood Page 6

  My footsteps made her look up, and though she smiled she seemed momentarily frightened, as if I'd come to revoke her son's recovery.

  “Dr. Delaware.”

  “Hi, Mary Lou. How's everything?”

  The red hair was a flyaway frizz that she patted down. “Brandon's doing great— I probably should have called you to tell you.” She approached the counter. “Thanks so much for your help, Dr. Delaware.”

  “My pleasure. How's your mom?”

  She frowned. “Her hip's taking a long time to heal, and the other driver's being a butt— denying responsibility. We finally got ourselves a lawyer, but everything just drags out. So what brings you here?”

  “I'm trying to locate a student who was involved in research.”

  “A grad student?”

  “Undergrad. I assume you have a record of ongoing projects.”

  “Well,” she said, “that's generally not public information, but I'm sure you've got a good reason. . . .”

  “This girl's gone missing for a week, Mary Lou. The police can't do much, and her mother's frantic.”

  “Oh, no— but it's midquarter break. Students take off.”

  “She didn't tell her mother or her roommate, though she did say she'd continue to come here even during the break, to do research. So maybe the job took her out of town. A conference, or some kind of fieldwork.”

  “She didn't tell her mom anything?”

  “Not a word.”

  She crossed the room to a wall of file cabinets. Same golden beige. The outcome of someone's experiment on color perception? Out came a two-inch-thick computer printout that she laid on a desk and flipped through. “What's her name?”

  “Lauren Teague.”

  She searched, shook her head. “No one by that name registered with personnel on any federal or state grants— let's see about private foundations.” Another flip. She looked up, with the same worried expression I'd seen on her first visit to my office. Psychology's code of ethics forbids bartering with a patient. I'd traded something with her, wondered if I'd stepped over the line.

  “Nothing.”

  “Maybe there's a misunderstanding,” I said. “Thanks.”

  She crossed her mouth with an index finger. “Wait a second— when it's part-time work, sometimes the professors hire out through one of those employee management firms. It avoids having to pay benefits.”

  Another cabinet, another printout. “Nope, no Lauren Teague. Doesn't look as if she's working here, Dr. Delaware. You're sure the study was in psychology? Some of the other departments have behavioral science grants— sociology, biology?”

  “I assumed psychology, but you could be right,” I said.

  “Let me call over to the administration building, see what the central employee files turn up.” Glance at the wall clock. “Maybe I can catch someone.”

  “I really appreciate this, Mary Lou.”

  “Don't even think about it,” she said, as she dialed. “I'm a mom.”

  * * *

  No job listing anywhere on campus. Mary Lou looked embarrassed— an honest person confronting a lie.

  “But,” she said, “they do have her enrolled. Junior psych major, transferred from Santa Monica College. Tell you what— I'll pull our copy of her transcript. I can't give you her grades, but I will tell you which professors she took classes from. Maybe they know something.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Hey,” she said, “we're not even close to even in the thank-you department. . . . Okay, here we go: This past quarter she took a full load— four psych courses: Introductory Learning Theory with Professor Hall, Perception with Professor de Maartens, Developmental with Ronninger, Intro Social Psych with Dalby.”

  “Gene Dalby?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We were classmates,” I said. “Didn't know he switched from clinical practice to teaching Social.”

  “He came on full-time a couple of years ago. Good guy, one of the less pompous ones. Even though he drives a Jag.” Her eyes rounded and she pretended to slap her wrist. “Forget I said that.” She began to return the transcript to the drawer.

  “Lauren told her mother she got straight A's.”

  “Like I said, Dr. Delaware, grades are confidential.” Her eyes dropped to the paper. Tiny smile. “But if I was her mother I'd be proud. Smart girl like that, I'm sure there's an explanation. Here, let me write those professors’ names down for you. Ronninger's on sabbatical, but the others are teaching all year. By this time I doubt they're in, but good luck.”

  “Thanks. You'd make a good detective.”

  “Me?” she said. “Never. I don't like surprises.”

  * * *

  She locked up, and I walked her through the lobby, both our footsteps echoing on black terrazzo. When she was gone I strode back to the elevators and read the directory. Simon de Maartens's office was on the fifth floor, Stephen Z. Hall's and Gene R. Dalby's on the sixth.

  I pushed the button and waited and thought about Lauren's lie to Andrew Salander. No research job. Probably covering for her real employment. Stripping, hooking, both. Resuming her old ways. Or she'd never stopped.

  Runway modeling. Another lie? Or maybe gigs at the Fashion Mart were just another way to cash in on her looks.

  Smart kid, but enrollment in college and good grades weren't contradictory to plying the flesh trade. Back when Lauren had worked for Gretchen Stengel, the Westside Madam had employed several college girls. Beautiful young women making easy money— big money. Someone able to compartmentalize and rationalize would find the logic unassailable: Why give up five-hundred-dollar tricks for a six-buck-an-hour part-time bottle-washing gig without benefits?

  Salander had said Lauren was living off investments, and I wondered if her body was the principal. If so, her disappearance could be nothing more than a quarter-break freelance to accrue spare cash.

  No car, because she was flying— jetting off somewhere with a sheik or a tycoon or a software emperor, any man sufficiently rich and deluded to fall for the ego sop of purchased pleasure.

  Lauren serving as amusement for a few days, returning home nicely invested.

  But if that was the case, why had she raised her mother's anxiety by not providing a cover story? And why hadn't she packed clothing?

  Because this particular job required a new wardrobe? Or no clothing at all beyond the threads on her back?

  She had taken her purse, meaning she had her credit cards. What did a party girl require other than willingness and magic plastic?

  Maybe she was punishing Jane by slipping away without explanation— letting Jane know she wouldn't be controlled.

  Or perhaps the answer was painfully simple: rest and recreation after grinding away for grades. Cooling out in one of the places she'd used before— nice quiet Malibu motel— if that was true.

  Maybe Lauren had done the L.A.-to-Reno shuttle, found her old stomping grounds lucrative, decided to stay for a while. . . . The elevator doors wheezed open, and I rode up to five. Professor Simon de Maartens's door was decorated with Far Side cartoons and a newspaper clipping about moose deaths from acid rain. Closed. I knocked. No answer. The handle didn't turn.

  I had no more success at Stephen Hall's unadorned slab of chartreuse wood, but Gene Dalby's door was open and Gene was sitting at his desk, wearing a rumpled white shirt and khakis, bare feet propped, gray laptop resting on a skinny stalk of thigh. He typed, hummed tonelessly, wiggled his toes. A pair of huarache sandals sat near the legs of his chair. Coffee bubbled in an old white machine. A single window to his left framed rooftops and the northern edge of the campus botanical gardens. From a boom box on the ledge came supernatural guitar licks and a bruised voice. Stevie Ray Vaughan's “Crossfire.”

  I said, “Uh, hi, Professor Dalby. Could we talk about my grades?”

  Gene's head turned. Same bony pencil face and jug ears and rebellious ginger hair. His temples had silvered. Black-framed half-lens reading glasses rode the center
of a swooping, askew hook of a nose. He grinned, placed the specs on the desk, did the same with the laptop. “No way. You flunk.”

  Jumping up to his full, ostrich-necked six-four, all loose limbs and oversized hands and bobbing head, he clasped my shoulders and shook his head in wonderment, as if my arrival heralded the second coming of something.

  Gene is one of the most outgoing people I know, a paragon of unadorned friendliness, hyperactive maestro of the thunderous greeting. His good cheer is nearly constant, and he avoids complexity. Unusual traits in a psychologist. So many of us were introspective, overly imaginative kids who got into the field trying to figure out why our mothers were depressed no matter what we did. In grad school a lot of people found him too good to be true and distrusted him. He and I always got along, though it rarely went beyond off-color jokes and casual lunches.

  “So,” he said. “Alex. How long has it been?”

  “A while.”

  “Light-years, man. Here, sit— Coffee?”

  I took a side chair, accepted a mug of something strong and bitter and vaguely coffeelike. He kicked the sandals under the desk. The office was tiny, and his size didn't help. He hunched like a pet confined by a cruel owner.

  “Working during the break?” I said.

  “Best time, less distraction. Besides, back when I was in practice I used to see fifty, sixty patients a week. That was real work. This academic racket is legalized theft. Nine months a year, make your own hours.” He laughed. “These guys love to complain, but it's a paid vacation.”

  “When did you make the switch?” I said.

  “Three years ago. Sold the practice to my associates and presented the department with an offer they couldn't refuse: They take me on part-time, no job security, no benefits, and I carry a heavy teaching load, in exchange for a clinical full professorship and no assignment to committees.”

  “No publishing treadmill.”

  “Exactly, but the funny thing is even though I didn't plan to, I'm doing research anyway. First time in years. Asking questions that really interest me rather than churning out garbage in tribute to the tenure gods. And I love the teaching, man. The kids are great. Despite what the idiot pundits say, students are getting smarter.”

  “What kind of research are you doing?” I said.

  “Political attitudes in little kids. We go out to grade schools, try to gauge their perceptions of candidates. You'd be surprised how much little kids know about the scumbags who run for office. I feel like I'm home— social psych was always my first love. I went into clinical because I also liked clinical and I thought it would be nice to help people and all that. But, mainly, because I needed to make a buck. Married with kids— unlike you, I never went through the swinging bachelor stage.”

  “You've got the wrong guy there, Gene.”

  “I don't think so, man. I distinctly recall you being a departmental love object. Even the girls who didn't shave their legs looked at you that way.”

  “I must have missed it,” I said.

  He grinned. “Listen to him, that coyness— all part of the charm. Anyway . . . you look great, Alex.”

  “You too.”

  “I look like I always did— Ichabod Crane on methamphetamine. But yeah, I'm doing what I can to stay in shape, got into long-distance hiking. Jan and I did the John Muir Trail last summer, Alaska before that.” He turned the volume down on Stevie Ray.

  I named the song.

  He said, “S.R.V. He was the man. Sad, huh? Struggles his whole life with dope and booze, plays bars for chump change, finally gets sober, makes it big, and the damn plane goes down. Talk about an object lesson.”

  “Live life to the fullest,” I said.

  “Live life and don't worry. Be happy— like that other song. Been telling that to patients for years, now I'm following my own advice. Not that it took courage or some big-time follow-your-bliss thing to motivate me. I got lucky— bought in at ground level with a start-up software company, turned a penny stock into dollars. Ten years of bad stock tips from my brother-in-law, finally one pays off. We're not talking private jet here, but now if I don't like the taste of something I don't have to eat it. The kids are in college and Jan's law practice is doing fine. Life is shockingly good, thanks to dot-com madness. The company's going to shit, but I've already sold.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Even traded the Honda for a Jag— Don't hate me 'cause I'm beautiful.” He shifted in his chair, cracked his knuckles. “So what brings you here? Doing some teaching yourself?”

  “No, I'm trying to locate a student named Lauren Teague.”

  “Locate as in . . . ?”

  I told him about the seven-day absence, implied without spelling it out that Lauren had once been a patient, emphasized Jane Abbot's anxiety.

  “Poor lady,” he said. “So you were here and just dropped in?”

  “No, I thought you might be able to help me. Lauren told her roommate she had a research job here, but that doesn't seem to be true. She was in four classes last quarter, one of them your Intro Social section. I'm checking with all the profs, see if anyone remembers her.”

  “Lauren Teague,” he said. “I sure don't. Had five hundred plus kids in that class. What others did she take?”

  I named the courses.

  “Let's see,” he said. “Herb Ronninger is out in the Indian Ocean somewhere studying violent preschoolers— his class pulls over six hundred, so even if he were here I doubt he could help you. De Maartens and Hall are young-buck new-hires, and Learning and Perception tend to be a bit smaller. Let me call them for you.”

  “I already tried their offices. Do you have home numbers?”

  “Sure.” He found and copied the listings, handed them to me.

  “Thanks.”

  “Lauren Teague,” he said, putting his glasses back on. He opened a bottom desk drawer, rifled papers for a while, pulled out a list of names and grades. “Yeah, she was enrolled all right. . . . Did well, too. Very well— eighteenth out of 516. . . . Good, solid A's on all her exams. . . . B plus on her paper.” More scrounging produced another list: “‘Iconography in the Fashion Industry.’ Oh, her.”

  “You remember her.”

  “The model,” he said. “I thought of her that way because she looked like one— all the basics: tall, blond, gorgeous. And when I read the paper, I figured she'd been writing from experience. She also stood out because she was quite a bit older than the average junior— pushing thirty, right?”

  “She's twenty-five.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, she seemed older. Maybe because she dressed maturely— pantsuits, dresses, expensive-looking stuff. I remember thinking, This girl has money. Kind of aloof, too. She used to sit in the back by herself, take notes constantly. Never saw her with any other students. . . . So why'd I give her a B plus on the paper? . . . If the students want them, I hand them back, don't know if she picked hers up . . . but I do keep a comment card. . . .” Bending low, he began tossing papers out of drawers, created a high pile on the desk. “Okay, here goes.” He flourished a stack of rubber-banded blue index cards. “My notes say, ‘High on anger, low on data.’ If I remember, it was a bit of a screed, Alex.”

  “Anger at the fashion industry?” I said.

  “From what I recall. Probably the usual feminist stuff— woman as meat, subservient roles coerced by unrealistic conceptions of femininity. I get at least two dozen every quarter. All valid points, but sometimes they substitute passion for facts. I really can't remember this particular paper, but if I had to guess, that would be it. So she left without telling Mom. Is that an aberration?”

  “According to Mom.”

  He scratched his chin. “Yeah, as a parent that would worry me.” Placing his feet on the floor and his hands on his knees, he looked at me over the rims of the half-glasses. “It's funny— actually it's anything but funny— your coming around about a missing student. When you first told me, it gave me a start. Because so
mething like this happened last year. Another girl— some kind of campus beauty queen. Shane something, or Shana . . . Shanna— I don't recall her exact name. Left her dorm room one night and never came back. Big stir on campus for a few days, then nothing. It affected me more than it might've because Jan and I had just sent our Lisa off to Oberlin. She was fine in the separation-anxiety department, but we weren't doing so well. I'd just started to settle down— had stopped phoning the poor kid twelve times a day— and this Shanna thing happens.”