I'll Let You Go

CHAPTER 25. Carved Fungi

An unexpected thing happened when Trinnie and Samson sat down for supper at Ivy at the Shore: she lost focus. The manic, aggrieved woman had used her brother’s office to find him — steeped in fervid self-righteousness, she had relished every step of the ambush. Yet after that first encounter, standing next to him under the fluorescent lights of Rampart, an uncanny light that made everything too real hence not real enough, after they had agreed to see each other that very night, Trinnie was all peace and love as she wended her way back to Saint-Cloud. Climbing from the bath, she felt acutely alive. She chose a simple black shift and left the house with a bounce in her step, the chill air a tonic. The top was down on the Cabriolet.

Sam Dowling was a childhood friend; well, more a friend of Dodd’s. His family had been poor (they lived south of Olympic) but, like pioneers before them, were determined to give their son a Beverly Hills education. He was one of the few kids at BV — maybe the only one — to have gotten close to her brother, and for that Trinnie was ever grateful. He wasn’t a user, either; she knew he didn’t pal around with Dodd for the perks, and there were plenty. (Not that Trinnie would have cared.) Sam was a gawky, good-hearted boy, clueless in matters of money and social status, the latter of which her brother was sorely lacking. The future detective’s democratic qualities and all-around innocent kindnesses were rewarded with lavish summer trips, three in a row to their Great Camp on Saranac Lake.

She knew a few things about him — that he’d married young and become a cop; that he’d been shot twice in the chest during a “routine traffic stop” and not been expected to live; that his marriage was the thing that didn’t survive. When he recovered, he moved to Fiji to soul-search, with Dodd fronting him money to build a small resort for scubaholics. But law enforcement was in his blood, and Fiji was too damn peaceful. He sold the hotel, repaid his friend and returned to L.A. with an eye on a detective’s shield.

He re-entered Trinnie’s life when her brother called on him to mediate in the awkward business of the stolen book and then again when her husband, Marcus Weiner, the eccentric and beloved Hollywood agent, vanished into thin air.

Sam Dowling was always “interested.” When he appeared on that terrible morning, standing with Louis Trotter and his children in the lobby of La Colonne — ground zero — looking so fresh and dapper, and the heiress so disheveled, anyone could see in his eyes how he was sorry-grateful the crazy man had left her at last. He tried to insinuate himself into her life, but it was not to be; soon after, she began the years of flight and exile.

“I’ve been reading about you,” he said.

“Where?” she asked, surprised. “The AA newsletter?”

“Internet — I’ve asked Jeeves all about you.”

“Oh shit. Google’d again.”

“And that piece in House and Garden, about the maze. At Saint-Cloud.”

“You’re pretty well read for a cop.”

The detective was endearingly nervous around her. Physically, his blade-like profile and droll, homespun mouth were reminiscent of Joe DiMaggio’s.

“Do you ever see my brother?”

“Not recently. We talk.”

“And Father?”

“Nominally.” He laughed, almost to himself. “I know it’s incredible, but he still keeps me on retainer. I’ve told him I don’t want the money, but he insists.”

“That’s Dad.”

“A good man. His health?”

“Great.”

“Your mom?”

“Everyone’s fine.”

They spoke with bemused affection of her father’s monumental funerary quest, then Trinnie broached the subject of Samson being shot (one seemed to follow the other). He said it probably hadn’t been the worst thing, because it got him to slow down and reassess priorities. Trinnie thought his response a bit clichéd, then busted herself for being so cynical—she wasn’t the one who had taken a bullet. His humor and humility won out, and held her attention. She asked if he still spoke to his wife, and Samson said no, not in years.

Since she had sat down, a familiar-looking middle-aged man had been stealing glances. Trinnie finally met his gaze; he stood and walked over. He was John Burnham, one of the heads of William Morris. A friend of Marcus Weiner’s from the mail room days, Mr. Burnham politely paid his respects without referring to the debacle, adding that he would love to talk to her about designing a maze for his Hancock Park home.

When he returned to his table, Samson said, “You know, I still have feelers out for Marcus.”

“I would have thought,” said Trinnie, backtracking, “that you’d have stayed more in touch with my brother.”

“That’s not often easy — the world he moves in is a little rarefied. I mean, it’s fun to joyride in his jet to some abandoned mental asylum … once.” She laughed, and it made him cocky. “But twice? A bit epic for my taste. That’s your world.”

“Was that a dig, Detective?”

“Sorry — that didn’t come out quite right. I just meant ‘to the manor born.’ ”

“I’m afraid my world has shrunk.”

“I doubt a shrunken world could hold you, Trinnie.”

He touched her hand, then withdrew it, sipping his drink. He decided to confess what she already knew. He admitted to finding her husband in the Adirondacks, rehashing everything her father had said, ending with the hospitalization and escape. The only detail she hadn’t heard was how, before his capture, Marcus had taken sanctuary on cold nights at St. John’s in the Wilderness, the family parish.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Katrina — I think he wanted more than anything in the world not to hurt you.”

“Didn’t do such a good job, did he?”

Samson started to say something, but she stopped him.

They sat awhile in silence. When she asked if he’d take her to his apartment, he actually got up to flag down the waiter for the bill.

Trinnie had never been inside the El Royale. She always imagined the suites to be rococo in that thirties way, and maybe some were, but not Sam’s. Like the detective himself, the rooms were simple, solid and unprepossessing — with the occasional flair.

They made love without niceties and she felt herself pulled through the maze. He pulled her through. The surgical scar on his chest was like a shadowy imprint of barbed wire. She sobbed and keened as they fucked, but he never stopped advancing and she was glad he didn’t bother with useless questions such as what was the matter and was she OK. She felt the withheld drug of his come, hating the condom and all its second-skin safeties. This was a man she had known as a girl and now he carried her on a litter, on a bier through the bower back to the lake — hallelujah of painted summers at Twig House, Katrina and Dodd taking turns at the Chris-Craft, dizzying bounty of shimmering Saranac space, breaking the godly glass of water surrounding thirty thousand Trotter-owned acres, past great stands of maple and oak steeped in kettle ponds, bogs ringed with hemlock — past Pulpit Rock — past stone chalets and Orientalist sleeping cabins while loons and red-breasted mergansers called from their perches. Louis in black tie and Bluey in Halston sat on the boathouse porch sipping hot buttered rum from an army canteen. At nighttime, the children stormed the gates of heaven: campfires roared amid hullabaloo of square dancing, and the Dowling boy moved as if in a paradisal dream: lanterns led to the darkly dizzying mahogany-clapboard Great Camp with its diamond-fretted windows and white birch bark appliqué—marking pathways past cedar Parthenon replica — past elaborate stickwork of old icehouse to brainstorm siding of breeze-way containing the funicular; they climbed in and ascended — that’s where he first kissed her, smelling girl-breath of cinnamon, spruce and beer. Their destination was the pole-worked bowling alley on the hill where Sinatra and Bobo Rockefeller played. She was twelve, and Samson, fifteen.

One summer, a servant drove them to Tear of the Clouds lake. Dodd was sick, and Sam had her all to himself. She couldn’t have known what that meant; she couldn’t have known anything about it. The detective never forgot the sights and sounds and smells of that day, and years later revisited those sacred waters in his mind while shrapneled body healed. When he flew back to see the jailed Marcus, he took a side trip there — to all the old haunts — but they were lapsed and foreign, without even the familiar desuetude of rooms after party guests have gone.

Enfolded in his arms, she felt her husband near. After all, hadn’t Sam Dowling been the last to see him? Now, she came off the lake and was high up La Colonne, high in the boudoir of the tower before it officially sheared — holding court while their vows still held. At the El Royale, she smelled her obsession again … and later, at home at Saint-Cloud, as she fell asleep she too hovered over Twig House before settling into its game-stuffed den where her father kept his whimsical collection of fungi — everyone at the lake had their fungi. Mr. Trotter had commissioned a villager to inscribe one of the pieces in Latin:

Dive, be not fearful how dark the waves flow;

Sing through the surge, and bring pearls up to me;

Deeper, ay, deeper; the fairest lie low.

Dodd Trotter was excited, and slightly embarrassed. Marcie Millard — and this was something one of his own attorneys subsequently confirmed — Marcie Millard said the general feeling was that the Board was poised to react favorably to the proposal of naming a wholly revamped Beverly Vista School in the benefactor’s honor. There was some opposition, she said, but that was to be expected. Things were looking up, yet the question of how to live it down as far as his sister went (should the new name come to pass) whimsically asserted itself.

It was easy to see why the Board might be seduced. The new facility would include underground parking, a world-class planetarium, a theater-in-the-round (like the high school’s, only larger), pool and gymnasium, a two-acre rooftop park and the kind of library where streaming-video conferencing, “smart” books, virtual homework networks and PowerPoint presentations were de rigueur. Wolfgang Puck came aboard with three menus for the cafeteria — organic, ethnic and traditional American. Yoga, fencing and Wu Shu would be offered, alongside more traditional sporting pursuits; a fund would be created to underwrite uniforms, playground equipment and musical instruments, in perpetuity. Even the backs of classroom chairs would be fitted with flat-panel screens.

The Quincunx offices weren’t far from the targeted campus, and he often took his “BV walks” after lunch. Dodd apprized the Spanish duplexes, stucco dingbats and occasional multi-units on the school’s periphery, then forged past the hideous dirty pink bungalows stuck on the glum, aging playground; strolled from Elm Street to Gregory Way, then to Rexford Drive — peering through the barred gate at the empty library along the way (what was sadder than an empty library?) — then on to Charleville, where sat the condemned, bell-towered auditorium. One of these early walkabouts had engendered a startling idea: what if he were to build a new P.S. template — the “Lilliputian university”? His friend the good Dr. Goodnight had shown the world it could be done with his Cary Academy in North Carolina, and Courtney Ross had made terrific inroads with her place in the Hamptons … though for a project of commensurate scale or even somewhat smaller “footprint” Dodd would need a tad more land. Just a scoche … still, he resolved to build the complex in such a way that wouldn’t scare off the Board, a design that so artfully concealed its grandness that it would scarcely be noticed. In weaker moments, he thought maybe he should just have his friend Mr. Gehry wrap the whole thing in titanium, bungalows included.

He wondered: what would it take to actually purchase Beverly Vista’s hundred or so surrounding residences? The duplexes couldn’t go for much more than $600,000 apiece, though it wouldn’t have mattered if they were $10 million. (He had the capital.) Dodd Trotter could buy up entire blocks: all the crappy five-story condos with fancy names — Rexford Plaza, Rexford House, Rexford Park — and outlying grids with private homes, too. It was a stroke of genius. He got that adrenalized, impervious feeling in blood and brain that usually presaged a buying jag, only this time it wasn’t from skipping meds. He would call his consultant and let the acquisitions begin. His companies had more than sixty thousand employees now — dingbats and multi’s would be purchased for secretaries to live in gratis for their first six months of employment; houses and duplexes tagged for newly relocated low-to-mid-level managers. Stealthily, he would mount his campaign — Marcie would be the only one to know. Hadn’t Marlborough School in Hancock Park done the same thing? Bought up the neighborhood for their expanding needs without anyone being the wiser? The trick was to pull it off without displacing schoolkids … disrupting the community was the last thing he wanted. Maybe he’d focus on buying out the childless, first — then snap up houses of parents with Vista students at the very end, just before construction commenced … or maybe buy the properties now but have everyone sign covert agreements allowing them squatters’ rights until given notice to vacate; that way no one would be inconvenienced. He’d offer three times the fair market value, and if they hit a snag — if someone got stubborn and wouldn’t sell — they’d sweeten the pot with Quincunx stock options. Everyone had his price.

“Frances-Leigh?”

“Yes, Mr. Trotter?”

“Were you able to locate him?”

“Yes sir, I was.”

“Where does he live?”

“In Simi Valley.”

“Isn’t that, like, Cop World? What’s he doing out there?”

“His son’s in law enforcement.”

“Son? I guess Trinnie was wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“About him being a fag.”

“I wouldn’t know about that!”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Sure did.”

“Let’s call him up.”

Dodd sat there in his Aeron. When she had Dr. Janklow on the line, he rocked a full minute before picking up.

“Dr. Janklow! It’s Dodd Trotter.”

“Well, hello!” said the voice on the other end — gone reedily eager and tentative with age. “Gee, that was quick! The woman told me you were going to call.”

“How are you?”

“Miserable! Had cancer three times already. Cancer loves me.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“I just like to bitch and moan, that’s all. But I’m all right. Getting my fifth wind up here in beautiful Simi.”

“Well, it’s great to hear your voice.”

“You did rather well for yourself.”

“Got lucky, that’s all.”

“Now, I don’t know if I believe that. Been reading about you on the Internet.”

“Ugh.”

“Don’t worry!” he said with a laugh. “Nothing too terrible.”

“Dr. Janklow, I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of you — what an important force you were in my life. You were always there for me.”

“That’s a wonderful thing. A wonderful thing to hear.”

“And I wanted to call to say hello and see how you are — and if there was anything you needed.”

“Well, no — unless you were thinking of dropping a few billion on me. You know, I’m set pretty well. My son’s here; he and his wife and the grandchildren live close by. I’m doing all right. But now … what is it that you need, Mr. Trotter?”

That was the Dr. Janklow he remembered; the sage who gently turned the tables. “Would you — I’d love to take you to dinner.”

“Well, I … yes, that would be nice! Certainly, yes. That’s one wish I can grant! But I don’t drive so well anymore … and I don’t like imposing—”

“I’ll send a car.”

“It’s quite a ways.”

“There’re a few things I’d like to talk with you about — about the school. Beverly Vista. Some thoughts and plans …”

“Marcie told me.”

“Marcie did?”

“Oh yes — you know Marcie still keeps me up on all the doings. She’s a little compulsive that way, but she means well. Does well by the kids, that’s for sure. Always has their interests at heart. Now, Marcie said you were cooking up some wonderful things and I don’t doubt it. But I had no idea you’d call.”

“She’s the one who brought me back to it.”

“She’ll do that if you’re not careful! I’ve been knowing the Millards forever. Do you know Peter? Peter Millard?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Helluva surgeon.”

“Well, we are ‘cooking up’ some wonderful things — and I’d like you to be a part of them.”

“I’m an old man, you know. And I’m disgusted with what’s going on in today’s schools — all of ’em.”

“We’re going to change that.”

“Disgusted! I don’t know how I can be of help.”

“Just sitting down and breaking bread with you would make a difference.”

“That sounds rather biblical! Guess my age elicits that. But, Jesus, the guns changed everything. Schools have become damn shooting galleries. I retired before all that, thank God. The minute kids started bringing guns to class — well, that was just the end of the world, far as I could see.”

That night, Dodd told his wife he was divesting himself of far-flung ruins — his hobby had played itself out. They made love for the first time in months, and afterward Joyce nervously told him about her special project; how she bought land at Westwood Village Memorial Park because those babies needed a home that wasn’t a potter’s field. She said she hadn’t yet told his father, and Dodd agreed that was probably a good thing. For the time being, anyway. He was so gentle and understanding, and it felt like they were coming to new ground. He said he needed to get back in physical shape, and she made him promise to do yoga with her at the house with Ana Forrest. They spoke of their children and general good fortune. Dodd suggested they go away on a little trip around the time the kids took off on their summer holiday. There were plenty of jets to go around.

As they fell asleep, Joyce touched his shoulder and whispered, “Thank you.” She wasn’t sure that he heard; she wanted it to be more than subliminal. So she said it again.