Silent Partner Read online

  “I think we all know what oral sex is,” I said.

  His eyebrows rose. “Do we? I wonder. Do any of you wonder?”

  “This is bullshit,” said Aurora. “Got too many things to do.” She stood, hefted her carpetbag, and stamped out of the room. Three or four others followed quickly.

  The door slammed. A tight silence followed. Sharon's eyes were moist and her earlobe had been tugged scarlet.

  “Let's move on to something else,” I said.

  “Let's not!” shouted Maddy. “Paul says no holds barred—why the hell should she be the exception?” Her anger seemed to lift her from the floor. “Why the hell does she get saved every time she gets into her defensive mode and shuts us out!” To Sharon: “This is reality, honey, not some fucking sorority game.”

  “A fucking sorority game wouldn't be half-bad,” mused Julian. He sucked on his pipe ostentatiously.

  “Back off,” I said.

  He smiled as if he hadn't heard me, stretched and recrossed his legs.

  “Sorry, Alex, no back-offs,” Walter informed me. “Paul's rules.”

  A tear dribbled down Sharon's cheek. She wiped it away. “They do the usual.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Sucking.”

  “Ah,” said Walter. “Now we're getting somewhere.” He held out his hands, palms up, fingers curled. “Come on, keep going.”

  The gesture seemed lecherous. Sharon sensed it too. She looked away from him and said, “That's all, Walter.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” said Julian, raising a professorial pipe. “Let's operationalize. Does she suck him? Or does he suck her? Or have they advanced to mutual sucking, the old six-nine pretzel?”

  Sharon's hands flew to her face. She coughed to keep from crying.

  “Camille,” said Maddy. “What bullshit.”

  “Enough,” I barked.

  Maddy's face darkened. “Another authoritarian father figure heard from.”

  “Easy,” said someone. “Everyone mellow out.”

  Sharon got to her feet, scooping up her books, struggling with them, all white legs and rustling nylon. “I'm sorry, please excuse me.” She made a grab for the door-knob, twisted it and ran out.

  Walter said, “Catharsis. Could be a breakthrough.”

  I looked at him, at all of them. Saw vulture smiles, smugness. And something else—a flicker of fear.

  “Class dismissed,” I said.

  I caught up with her just as she reached the sidewalk.

  “Sharon?”

  She kept running.

  “Wait a second. Please.”

  She stopped, kept her back to me. I stepped in front of her. She stared down at the pavement, then up at the sky. The night was starless. Her hair merged with it so that only her face was visible. A pale, floating mask.

  “I'm sorry,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No, it was my fault. I acted like a baby, totally inappropriate.”

  “There's nothing inappropriate about not wanting to be bludgeoned. They're some bunch. I should have kept a tighter rein on things, should have seen what was happening.”

  She finally made eye contact. Smiled. “That's all right. No one could have seen.”

  “Is it like that all the time?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Dr. Kruse approves?”

  “Dr. Kruse says we have to confront our own defense systems before being able to help others.” Small laugh. “I guess I have a ways to go.”

  “You'll do fine,” I said. “In the long run, this kind of stuff's irrelevant.”

  “That's nice of you to say, Dr. Delaware.”

  “Alex.”

  The smile widened. “Thanks for checking on me, Alex. I guess you'd better be heading back to class.”

  “Class is over. Are you sure you're okay?”

  “I'm fine.” She shifted her weight from one hip to the other, trying to get a firmer grip on the books.

  “Here, let me help you with those.” Something in her was bringing out the Lancelot in me.

  She said, “No, no, that's okay,” but didn't stop me from taking the books.

  “Where's your car?”

  “I'm walking. I live in the dorms. Curtis Hall.”

  “I can drive you to Curtis.”

  “It's really not necessary.”

  “It would be my pleasure.”

  “Well, then,” she said, “I'd like that.”

  I dropped her off at the dorm, made a date for the following Saturday.

  She was waiting at the curb when I came to pick her up, wearing a yellow cashmere sweater, black-and-yellow tartan skirt, black knee socks, and loafers. She let me open the car door for her. The second my hand touched the steering wheel, hers was upon it, warm and firm.

  We had dinner at one of the smoky, noisy, beer-and-pizza joints that cling to every college campus—the best I could afford. Staking out a corner table, we watched Road Runner cartoons, ate and drank, smiled at each other.

  I couldn't keep my eyes off her, wanted to know more about her, to forge an impossible, instant intimacy. She fed me nibbles of information about herself: She was twenty-one, had grown up on the East Coast, graduated from a small women's college, come west for graduate school. Then she steered the conversation to grad school. Academic issues.

  Remembering the insinuations of the other students, I asked about her association with Kruse. She said he was her faculty adviser, made it sound unimportant. When I asked what he was like, she said he was dynamic and creative, then changed the subject, again.

  I dropped it but remained curious. After that ugly session, I'd asked around about Kruse, had learned he was one of the clinical associates, a new arrival who'd already earned a reputation as a skirt-chaser and an attention-grabber.

  Not the kind of mentor I would have thought right for someone like Sharon. Then again, what did I really know about Sharon? About what was right for her?

  I tried to learn more. She danced nimbly away from my questions, kept shifting the focus to me.

  I experienced some frustration, understood for an instant the anger of the other students. Then I reminded myself we'd just met; I was being pushy, expecting too much too soon. Her demeanor suggested old money, a conservative, sheltered background. Precisely the kind of upbringing that would stress the dangers of instant intimacy.

  Yet there was the matter of her hand stroking mine, the open affection of her smile. Not playing hard-to-get at all.

  We talked psychology. She knew her stuff but kept deferring to my superior knowledge. I sensed real depth beneath the Suzy Creamcheese exterior. And something else: agreeableness. A ladylike niceness that caught me by pleasant surprise in that age of four-letter female anger masquerading as liberation.

  My diploma said I was a doctor of the mind, a sage at twenty-four, grand arbiter of relationships. But relationships still scared me. Women still scared me. Since adolescence I'd indentured myself to a regimen of study, work, more study, struggling to pull myself up out of blue-collar purgatory and expecting the human factor to fall into place along with my career goals. But new goals kept popping up and at twenty-four I was still pulling, my social life limited to casual encounters, mandatory, calisthenic sex.

  My last date had been more than two months ago—a brief misadventure with a pretty blond neonatology intern from Kansas who asked me out as we stood in the cafeteria line at the hospital. She suggested the restaurant, paid for her own meal, invited herself to my apartment, immediately sprawled on the couch, popped a Quaalude, and got peevish when I refused to take one. A moment later the peevishness was forgotten and she was buck-naked, grinning and pointing to her crotch: “This is L.A., Buster. Eat pussy.”

  Two months.

  Now here I was, sitting opposite a demure beauty who made me feel like Einstein and wiped her mouth even when it was clean. I drank her in. In the candle-in-chianti-bottle light of that pizza joint, everything she did seemed special: spurning beer for 7-Up, laughing like a kid at the
misfortunes of Wile E. Coyote, twirling strands of hot cheese around her finger before taking them between perfect white teeth.

  A flash of pink tongue.

  I constructed a past for her, one that reeked of high WASP sensibilities: summer homes, cotillions, deb balls, the hunt. Scores of suitors . . .

  The scientist in me snipped my fantasies midframe: total conjecture, hotshot. She's left you empty spaces—you're filling them in with blind guesses.

  I made another stab at finding out who she was. She answered me without telling me a thing, got me talking about myself again.

  I surrendered to the cheap thrills of autobiography. She made it easy. She was a first-rate listener, propping her chin on her knuckles, staring up at me with those huge blue eyes, making it clear that every word I uttered was monumentally important. Playing with my fingers, laughing at my jokes, tossing her hair so that the light caught her earrings.

  At that point in time I was God's gift to Sharon Ransom. It felt better than anything else I could recall.

  Without all that, her looks might have snagged me. Even in that raucous place teeming with lush young bodies and heartbreaking faces, her beauty was a magnet. It seemed obvious that every passing man was stopping and caressing her visually, the women appraising her with fierce acuity. She was unaware of it, remained zeroed in on me.

  I heard myself open up, talk about things I hadn't thought of in years.

  Whatever problems she might have, she'd clean up as a therapist.

  From the beginning I wanted her physically with an intensity that shook me. But something about her—a fragility that I sensed or imagined—held me back.

  For half a dozen dates it remained chaste: hand-holds and goodnight pecks, a noseful of that light, fresh perfume. I'd drive home swollen but oddly content, subsisting on recollections.

  As we headed toward the dorm after our seventh evening together, she said, “Don't drop me off yet, Alex. Drive around the corner.”

  She directed me to a dark, shaded side street, adjacent to one of the athletic fields. I parked. She leaned over, turned off the ignition, removed her shoes, and climbed over the seat and into the back of the Rambler.

  “Come,” she said.

  I followed her over, glad I'd washed the car. Sat beside her, took her in my arms, kissed her lips, her eyes, the sweet spot under her neck. She shivered, squirmed. I touched her breast. Felt her heart pounding. We kissed some more, deeper, longer. I put my hand on her knee. She shivered, gave me a look that I thought was fear. I lifted my hand. She put it back, between her knees, wedged me in a soft, hot vise. Then she spread her legs. I went exploring, up columns of white marble. She was splayed, had thrown her head back, had her eyes closed, was breathing through her mouth. No underwear. I rolled her skirt up, saw a generous delta soft and black as sable fur.

  “Oh, God,” I said and started to pleasure her.

  She held me back with one hand, reached for my zipper with the other. In a second I was free, pointing skyward.

  “Come to me,” she said.

  I obeyed.

  Chapter

  7

  With Milo out of town, my only other police contact was Delano Hardy, a dapper black detective who sometimes worked as Milo's partner. A few years ago he'd saved my life. I'd bought him a guitar, a classic Fender Stratocaster that Robin had restored. It was clear who owed whom, but I called him anyway.

  The desk man at West L.A. told me Detective Hardy wouldn't be in until the following morning. I debated trying him at home but knew he was a family man, always trying to scrounge more time for his kids, and left a message for him to call me.

  I thought of someone who wouldn't mind being called at home. Ned Biondi was one of those journalists who lived for the story. He'd been a metro writer-reporter when I met him, had since progressed to associate editor but managed to squeeze in a story now and then.

  Ned owed me. I'd helped reverse his daughter's descent to near-death from anorexia. He'd taken a year and a half to pay me, then added to his personal debt by profiting from a couple of big stories that I'd steered his way.

  Just after 9:00 P.M. I reached him at his home in Woodland Hills.

  “Doc. I was going to call you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, just got back from Boston. Anne-Marie sends her love.”

  “How's she doing?”

  “Still skinnier than we'd like, but otherwise great. She started social-work school this fall, got a part-time job, and found a new boyfriend to replace the bastard who dumped her.”

  “Give her my best.”

  “Will do. What's up?”

  “I wanted to ask you about a story in today's final. Suicide of a psychologist, page—”

  “Twenty. What about it?”

  “I knew the woman, Ned.”

  “Oh, jeez. That's lousy.”

  “Is there anything more to it than what you printed?”

  “No reason for there to be. It wasn't exactly a hot scoop. In fact I believe we got it over the phone from police communications—no one actually went out to the scene. Is there anything you know that I should?”

  “Nothing at all. Who's Maura Bannon?”

  “Just a kid—student intern. Friend of Anne-Marie's, in fact. She's doing a semester of work study, little here, little there. She was the one who pushed for the piece—kind of a naïve kid, thought the shri . . . psychologist suicide angle was newsworthy. Those of us familiar with the real world were less impressed, but we let her stick it in the computer just to make her happy. Turns out Section One ends up using it as filler—the kid's thrilled. Want me to have her call you?”

  “If she has anything to tell me.”

  “I doubt that she does.” Pause. “Doc, the lady in question—did you know her well?”

  My lie was reflexive. “Not really. It just came as a shock, seeing the name of someone I knew.”

  “Must have,” said Ned, but his tone had turned wary. “You called Sturgis first, I assume.”

  “He's out of town.”

  “Aha. Listen, Doc, I don't want to be insensitive, but if there's something about the lady that would flesh out the story, I'd be open to hearing about it.”

  “There's nothing, Ned.”

  “Okay. Sorry for snooping—force of habit.”

  “That's all right. Talk to you soon, Ned.”

  At eleven-thirty I took a walk in the dark, trudging up the glen toward Mulholland, listening to crickets and night birds. When I got home an hour later, the phone was ringing.

  “Hello.”

  “Dr. Delaware, this is Yvette at your service. I'm glad I caught you. A call came in for you twenty minutes ago from your wife up in San Luis Obispo. She left a message, wanted to make sure you got it.”

  Your wife. Slap-on-a-sunburn. They'd been making the same mistake for years. Once upon a time it had been amusing.

  “What's the message?”

  “She's on the move, will be hard to reach. She'll get in touch with you when she can.”

  “Did she leave a number?”

  “No, she didn't, Dr. Delaware. You sound tired. Been working too hard?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Stay well, Dr. Delaware.”

  “Same to you.”

  On the move. Hard to reach. It should have hurt. But I felt relieved, unburdened.

  Since Saturday I'd barely thought about Robin. Had filled my mind with Sharon.

  I felt like an adulterer, ashamed but thrilled.

  I crawled into bed and hugged myself to sleep. At two forty-five in the morning I woke up, wired and itchy. After throwing on some clothes I staggered down to the carport and started up the Seville. I drove south to Sunset, headed east through Beverly Hills and Boystown, toward the western tip of Hollywood and Nichols Canyon.

  At that hour, even the Strip was dead. I kept the windows open, let the sharp chill gnaw at my face. At Fairfax, I turned left, traveled north, and swung onto Hollywood Boulevard.

>   Mention the boulevard to most people, and, inevitably, one of two images comes to mind: the good old days of Grauman's Chinese, the Walk of the Stars, black-tie premieres, a neon-flooded night scene. Or the street as it is today—slimy and vicious, promising random violence.

  But west of that scene, just past La Brea, Hollywood Boulevard shows another face: a single mile of tree-lined residential neighborhood—decently maintained apartment buildings, old, stately churches, and only slightly tarnished two-story homes perched atop well-tended sloping lawns. Looking down on this smudge of suburbia is a section of the Santa Monica mountain range that meanders through L.A. like a crooked spine. In this part of Hollywood the mountains seem to surge forward threateningly, pushing against the fragile dermis of civilization.

  Nichols Canyon begins a couple of blocks east of Fair-fax, a lane and a half of winding blacktop feeding off the north side of the boulevard and running parallel to a summer-dry wash. Small, rustic houses sit behind the wash, concealed by tangles of brush, accessible only over homemade footbridges. I passed a Department of Water and Power terminal station lit by high arc lamps that gave off a harsh glare. Just beyond the terminal was flood-control district marshland fenced with chain link, then larger houses on flatter ground, sparsely distributed.

  Something wild and swift scurried across the road and dived into the bush. Coyote? In the old days Sharon had talked about seeing them, though I'd never spotted one.

  The old days.

  What the hell was I expecting to gain by exhuming them? By driving past her house like some moony teenager hoping to catch a glimpse of his beloved?

  Stupid. Neurotic.

  But I craved something tangible, something to reassure me she'd once been real. That I was real. I drove on.

  Nichols veered to the right. The straightaway turned into Jalmia Drive and compressed to a single lane, darkened even further under a canopy of trees. The road lurched, dipped, finally dead-ended without warning at a bamboo-walled cul-de-sac slotted with several steep driveways. The one I was looking for was marked by a white mailbox on a stake and a white lattice gate that sagged on its posts.

  I pulled to the side, parked, cut the engine, and got out. Cool air. Night sounds. The gate was unlocked and flimsy, no more of a barrier than it had been years ago. Lifting it to avoid scraping the cement, I looked around, saw no one. Swung the gate open and passed through. Closing it behind me, I began climbing.