Dr. Death

CHAPTER 22

I DROVE HOME, cold hands strangling the steering wheel, heart punching against my chest wall.

Try to forget the kids, they are no longer my affair. Concentrate on facts.

Milo was right. The facts fit. His instincts had aimed him at Richard. Time to be honest: so had mine. The first time I'd heard about Mate's death, Richard had popped into my head. I'd run from the truth, hidden behind the complexities of ethical conflict, but now reality was spitting in my face.

I recalled Richard's gloating after bringing up Mate's death: festive times. The sonofabitch finally got what he deserved.

Finally. Did that mean he'd turned to someone else when Goad had failed to follow through?

Means, motive. Vicarious opportunity. Ready with an alibi. Milo had pegged it right away. People like Richard didn't do their own dirty work.

For all my theories about co-optation and irony, did the van butchery boil down to stupid, bloody revenge?

But why? What could lead someone as bright as Richard to risk so much over a man who'd been no more than an accomplice to his wife's last wishes? Was he one of those skillful psychopaths bright enough to channel his drives into high finance?

Distressed properties. A man who profited from the distress of others. Had Richard been running from a truth of his own? The fact that Joanne had frozen him out of her life, shut him out completely, chosen death in a cheap motel room over a life with him in the Palisades?

Dying in the company of another man… the intimacy of death. The feminist journal-S(Hero)-wondered about the preponderance of female travelers, speculated about the sexual overtones of assisted suicide. Had Richard seen Joanne's last night as the worst kind of adultery? I supposed it was possible, but it still seemed so… clumsy.

Was Richard behind the phony book and the broken stethoscope? You're out of business, Doc?

A sick uneasiness slithered over me. Happy Traveling, You Sick Bastard… Why had Richard contacted me within a week of the murder? Stacy's college future, as he'd claimed, or, knowing that Quentin Goad had been arrested, was he preparing himself for exactly what had happened?

Asking me to see Eric, too.

Take care of the kids while I'm gone… Look how that had turned out.

Then I thought of something much worse. Eric, all that talk of guilt and expiation.

The directed child, the gifted firstborn who'd dropped out to tend to his mother, had seemed to be adjusting. Suddenly leaving his dorm room, sitting up all night… obsessed with guilt because guilt was all he felt?

Involved. Had his father been cruel enough, crazy enough to get him involved? I'd allowed myself to wonder if Eric had been Mate's slayer. Now that I'd seen his anger at work, those speculations took on weight. Richard's deal with Goad peters out, so he keeps it in the family. Dad in San Francisco, son down in L.A. for a couple of days with the keys to Dad's car. I wanted to think Richard was-if nothing else-too smart for that, but if he'd been willing to risk his family by passing cash in a con bar, was there any reason to trust his judgment?

Something-a fissure-had forced its way through this family. Something to do with Joanne's death-the how, the why. Bob Manitow claimed her deterioration was all due to depression, and maybe he was right. Even so, that kind of emotional collapse didn't manifest overnight. What had led a woman with two PhDs to destroy herself slowly?

Something long-standing… something Richard had reason to feel guilty about? A guilt so crushing it had caused him to displace his feelings onto Mate?

Kill the messenger.

Make it bloody.

Father and son. And daughter.

Stacy sitting alone at the beach. Eric sitting alone under a tree. Everyone isolated. Driven apart… something that Mate's murder had brought to a head? Here I was again, guessing. Obsessing.

Once, when I was nine, I went through a compulsive phase, labeling my drawers, lining my shoes up in the closet. Unable to sleep unless I pulled the covers over my head in a very special way. Or maybe I'd just been trying to shut out the sound of my father's rage.

I turned off Veteran onto Sunset, raced up the glen, was still groping and supposing when the road to my house appeared so suddenly I nearly missed it. Hooking onto the bridle path, I sped up the hill, drove through the gateposts, parked in front of my little chunk of the American dream.

Home sweet home. Richard's was being torn down, brick by brick.

Robin was in the living room, straightening up. No sign of Spike.

"Out in back," she said. "Doing his business, if you must know."

"A businessman."

She laughed, kissed me, saw my face. Looked at the file. "Looks like you've got business, too."

"Things you don't want to know about," I said.

"More on Mate? The news said they arrested someone."

"Did they." I told her about Korn and Demetri's drop-in.

"Here? Oh my God."

"Rang the bell and took him away in front of his kids."

"That's horrible-how could Milo do that?"

"Not his decision. The brass went around him."

"That's just horrible-must have been hell for you."

"A lot worse for the kids."

"Poor things… The father, Alex, is he capable of that? Sorry, they're still your patients, I shouldn't be asking."

I said, "I'm not sure they are. And I don't have a good answer to that."

But I'd answered her as clearly as if I'd spelled it out.

Sure, he's capable.

"Honey?" she said, cupping her hand around the back of my neck. She stood on her tiptoes, pressed her nose to mine. I realized I'd been standing there for a long time, silent, oblivious. The file felt leaden. I hoisted it higher.

She put her arm around my waist and we entered the kitchen. She poured iced tea for both of us and I sat at the table, placing Fusco's opus out of my field of vision. Fighting the urge to walk away from her, throw myself into the FBI man's crusade. Wanting to build up faith in Fusco's project, discover some grand, forensic aha! that would exonerate Richard, make me a hero in Stacy's eyes. Eric's, too.

Instead, I sat there, reached for the remote control, flicked on TV news. A red UPDATE! banner filled a corner of the screen. A very happy reporter clutched his microphone and warbled, "… in the murder of death doctor Eldon Mate. Police sources tell us that the man being questioned is Richard Theodore Doss, forty-six, a wealthy Pacific Palisades businessman and former husband of Joanne Doss, a woman whose suicide Dr. Mate assisted nearly a year ago. Reports of a possible murder-for-hire scheme have not been confirmed. A few minutes ago Doss's attorney arrived at the West Los Angeles police station. We'll update you on this story as it unfolds. Brian Frobush for On-the-Scene News."

In the background was the building I'd just left. The news crew must have showed up moments after I drove away.

I pressed OFF. Robin sat down next to me.

We touched glasses. I said, "Cheers."

I endured ten more minutes of togetherness. Then I told her I was sorry, picked up the file, and left.

Wounds.

Fissures. Real ones.

It was well after midnight. Robin had been asleep for over an hour and I was pretty sure she hadn't heard when I'd left the bed and made my way to the office.

I'd started with the file, but she'd come after me. Convincing me to bathe with her, take a walk, a long walk. Drive into Santa Monica for an Italian dinner. Come home and play Scrabble, then gin, then sit side by side in bed collaborating on the crossword puzzle.

"Like normal folks," I said, when she said she was sleepy.

"Acting. Genius."

"I love you-and see, I said it without making love first."

"Hey, a new pattern.

What do you mean?

Saying it before. How nice." She reached for me.

Now here I was, throwing on a robe, making my way through the dark house, feeling like a burglar.

Back in the office. Switching on the green-shaded desk lamp and casting a hazy beam on the file.

The room was cold. The house was cold. The robe was old terry cloth, worn to gauze in spots. No socks. The chill took hold in the soles of my feet and worked its way up to my thighs. Telling myself that was appropriate for the task at hand, I drew the file close and untied the string.

Fusco had spared no detail in his study of Grant Rushton/ Michael Burke.

Everything neat, organized, subheaded, three-hole-punched. The detached precision of postmortem reports, the weights and measures of degradation.

Page after page of crime-scene description-Fusco's summaries and analyses as well as some of the original police reports. The agent's prose was more erudite than the typically stilted cop-write, but still far from Shakespeare. He seemed to like dwelling on the nasty stuff, or maybe that was my fatigue and the cold talking.

I stuck with it, found myself entering a state of hyper-awareness as I sucked up page after page of small print, photographs, crime-scene Polaroids. Autopsy shots. The beautiful, hideous, lurid hues of the human body imploded, debased, exploited like a rain forest. Sternum-cracking, face-peeling, skin-flaying, all in the name of truth. The framing of flesh-tunnels in three-by-five universes, blossoming orchids of ruptured viscera, rivers of hemoglobin syrup.

Dead faces. The look. Extraction of the soul.

A realization strobed my brain: Mate would've liked this.

Had he sensed what was happening to him?

I returned my eyes to the pictures. Women-things that had once been women-propped up against trees. A page of abdominal close-ups, gashes and gapes on skin transmuted to plum-colored shapes sketched on gray paper. Precisely excised wounds. The geometry.

The chill found my chest. Inhaling and letting the breath out slowly, I studied the shapes and tried to recall the death shots of Mate that Milo had showed me up on Mulholland.

Craving equivalence between all of this and the concentric squares engraved in Mate's flabby white belly.

Some concordance, I supposed, but once again Milo was right. Lots of killers like to carve.

Skin art…

Where was Donny Salcido Mate, self-proclaimed

Rembrandt of the flesh? The Anatomy Lesson. Let us carve and learn.

Let us carve Daddy? 'Cause we hate Daddy but want to be him? The art of death… Why couldn't it be him? It should be him.

Then I thought of Guillerma Mate, the way she'd stood at the closet of that dingy little motel room, frozen, as I asked about her only child. Maybe faith was its own reward, but still, hers had to be a lonely life: a single mom, abandoned by her husband, disappointed by her only child.

She prayed regularly, offered thanks.

Casting her eye upon some grand world to come, or had she truly found peace? Her bus trip to L.A. said she hadn't.

Richard and his kids, Guillerma and her boy.

Alone, everyone alone.