“What were their complaints about him?”
Baron pursed his lips.
“Just that he was impersonal,” he said.
“Did they mention a doctor named Valcroix?”
Delilah shook her head.
Baron spoke again.
“We didn’t talk about much of anything. It was just a
brief visit.”
“I couldn’t wait to get out of there,” recalled
Delilah. “Everything was so mechanical.”
“We dropped off the fruit, left, and drove back home,”
Baron said with finality.
“A sad situation,” she sighed.
A GROUP of Touch people were sitting yoga-style on the
grass when I came out, eyes closed, palms pressed together, faces glowing in
the sun. Houten leaned against the fountain, smoking, eyes drifting idly in
their direction. He saw me coming, dropped the butt, stomped on it, and tossed
it in an earthenware trashbasket.
“Learn anything?”
I shook my head.
“Like I told you,” he cocked his head toward the
meditators who had now started to hum, “strange but harmless.”
I looked at them. Despite the white costumes, the
sandals, and the untrimmed beards, they resembled participants in a corporate
seminar, one of those glossy pop-psych affairs promoted by management to
increase productivity. The faces gazing heavenward were middle-aged and
well-fed, suffused with an executive look that bespoke prior lives of comfort
and authority.
Norman Matthews had been described to me as an
aggressive and ambitious man. A hustler. As Matthias he’d tried to come across
a holy man but there was enough cynicism in me to wonder if he hadn’t simply
traded one hustle for another.
The Touch was a gold mine: offer the prosperous
simplicity amid lush surroundings, remove the burden of personal
responsibility, substitute an ethos that equated health and vitality with
righteousness, and pass the collection plate. How could it miss?
But even if the whole thing was a scam it didn’t spell
kidnapping and murder. As Seth had pointed out, loss of privacy was the last
thing Matthias wanted, be he prophet or con man.
“Let’s take a look around,” said Houten, “and be done
with it.”
* * *
I was allowed free access to the grounds, permitted to
open any door. The sanctuary was domed and majestic, with clerestory windows
and biblical murals on the ceiling. The pews had been removed and the floor covered
with padded mats. There was a rough pine table in the center of the room and
little else. A woman in white dusted and swept, stopping only to smile at us
maternally.
The sleeping rooms were indeed cells—no larger than
the one in which Raoul was confined—low-ceilinged, thick-walled, and cool, with
a single window the size of a hardbound book and grilled with wood. Each room
was furnished with a cot and a chest of drawers. Matthias’s differed only in
that it had a small bookcase. His literary taste was eclectic—the Bible, the
Koran, Perls, Jung, Cousins’s
Anatomy of An Illness
, Toffler’s
Future
Shock
, the Bhagavad-Gita, several texts on organic gardening and ecology.
I took a tour of the kitchen, where cauldrons of broth
simmered on industrial stoves and bread baked sweetly in brick ovens. There was
a member’s library, its stock leaning toward health and agriculture, and a
conference room with textured adobe walls. And everywhere people in white
working, smiling, bright-eyed and friendly.
Houten and I traipsed through the fields, watching
Touch members tend the grapes. A black-bearded giant put down his shears and
offered us a freshly picked cluster. The fruit was moist to the touch and it
burst electrically upon my tongue. I complimented the man on the flavor. He
nodded and returned to his work.
It was well into the afternoon but the sun continued
to rage. My unprotected head began to ache and after cursorily inspecting the
sheepyard and the vegetable plots I told Houten I’d had enough.
We turned and walked back toward the viaduct. I
wondered what I’d accomplished, for the search had been symbolic, at best.
There wasn’t any reason to believe the Swope children were there. And if they
were, there’d be no way to find them. The Retreat was surrounded by hundreds of
acres, much of it forest. Nothing short of a bloodhound pack could cover it
all. Besides, monasteries are secret places, designed for refuge, and the
compound might very well harbor a maze of underground caverns, secret
compartments, and hidden passages that only an archaeologist could unravel.
It had been a futile day, I thought, but if it helped
Raoul confront reality it was worth it. Then I realized what
reality
meant and craved the balm of denial.
Houten had Bragdon bring Raoul’s personal effects in a
large manila envelope. In the end he’d agreed to accept the oncologist’s check
for six hundred eighty-seven dollars worth of fines and while he recorded the
amount in triplicate, I walked around the room restlessly, eager to get going.
The county map caught my eye. I located La Vista and
noticed a back road to the east that seemed to skirt the town, allowing entry
to the region from the outlying woodlands without actually passing through the
commercial district. If that was the case, avoiding Houten’s scrutiny was
easier than he’d let on.
After some hesitation I asked him about it. He fiddled
with a piece of carbon paper and continued writing.
“Oil company bought up the land, got the county to
seal off the road. There was big talk of deep deposits, prosperity just around
the corner.”
“Did they strike it rich?”
“Nope. Bone dry.”
The deputy brought Raoul out. I told him about my
visit to the Retreat and the negative findings. He took it in, looking downcast
and beaten, and offered no protest.
The sheriff, pleased with his passivity, treated him
with exquisite courtesy while he signed him out. He asked Raoul what he wanted
to do about his Volvo, and the oncologist shrugged and said to have it fixed,
he’d pay for it.
I led him out of the room and down the stairs.
He was silent throughout the ride home, not even
losing his cool when a chubby female border guard pulled us over and asked for
his identification. He accepted the indignity with a mute acquiescence that I
found pitiful. Two hours ago he’d been aggressive and poised for battle. I
wondered if he’d been laid low by the accumulated stress or if cyclical mood
swings were a part of his makeup I’d never noticed.
I was famished but he looked too grungy to take to a
restaurant so I bought a couple of burgers and Cokes at a stand in Santa Ana
and pulled to the side of the road near a small municipal park. I gave Raoul
his food and ate mine while watching a group of teenagers play softball, racing
to finish before nightfall. When I turned to look at him, he was asleep, the
food still wrapped and lying in his lap. I took it, stowed it in a trashcan and
started up the Seville. He stirred but didn’t awaken and by the time I got back
on the freeway he was snoring peacefully.
We reached L.A. by seven, just as traffic on the
downtown interchange was untangling. When I turned off at the Los Feliz exit he
opened his eyes.
“What’s your address?”
“No, take me back to the hospital.”
“You’re in no shape to go back there.”
“I must. Helen will be waiting.”
“You’ll only scare her looking like that. At least go
home and freshen up first.”
“I have a change of clothes in my office. Please,
Alex.”
I threw up my hands and drove to Western Peds. After
parking in the doctors’ lot I walked him to the front door of Prinzley.
“Thank you,” he said, looking at his feet.
“Take care of yourself.”
On the way back to the car I met Beverly Lucas leaving
the wards. She looked tired and worn, the oversized purse seeming to weigh her
down.
“Alex, I’m so glad to see you.”
“What’s the matter?”
She looked around to make sure no one was listening.
“It’s Augie. He’s been making my life miserable ever
since your friend interrogated him, calling me unfaithful, a quisling. He even
tried to embarrass me on rounds but the attending doc stopped it.”
“Bastard.”
She shook her head.
“What makes it hard is that I see his point. We were—close,
once. What he did in bed was nobody’s business.”
I took her by the shoulders.
“What you did was right. If you got enough distance to
see straight that would be obvious. Don’t let him get to you.”
She flinched at the harshness in my voice.
“I know you’re right. Intellectually. But he’s falling
apart and it hurts me. I can’t help my feelings.”
She started to cry. A trio of nurses walked our way. I
steered her off the walkway and into the stairwell to the doctors’ level.
“What do you mean falling apart?”
“Acting strange. Doping and drinking more heavily than
usual. He’s bound to get caught. This morning he pulled me off the ward and
into a conference room, locked the door, and came on to me.”
She lowered her eyes in embarrassment.
“He told me I was the best he’d ever had, actually
tried to get physical. When I stopped him he looked crushed. Then he started to
rant about Melendez-Lynch—how he’d scapegoated him and was going to try to use
the Swope case to terminate the fellowship. He started to laugh—it was a freaky
laugh, Alex, full of anger. He said he had an ace up his sleeve. That
Melendez-Lynch would never get rid of him.”
“Did he say what that was?”
“I asked him. He just laughed again and walked out.
Alex, I’m worried. I was just on my way to the residents’ dorm. To make sure he
was okay.”
I tried to talk her out of it but she was resolute.
She had an infinite capacity for guilt. Someday she’d make someone a wonderful
doormat.
It was clear she wanted me to accompany her to his
apartment, and tired as I was, I agreed to go with her, in case things got
hairy. And on the off-chance Valcroix really had an ace and might show it.
The residents’ dorm across the boulevard from the
hospital was a utilitarian affair, three stories of unfinished concrete over a
subterranean parking lot. Some of the windows had been brightened up with
plants and flower arrangements resting on sills or hanging from macrame
harnesses. But that didn’t stop it from looking like what it was: low-cost
housing.
An elderly black guard was stationed at the door—there
had been rapes in the neighborhood and the residents had screamed for security.
He looked at our hospital badges and let us pass.
Valcroix’s apartment was on the second floor.
“It’s the one with the red door,” said Beverly, pointing.
The corridor and all the other doors were beige.
Valcroix’s was scarlet and stood out like a wound.
“Amateur paint job?” I ran my hand over the wood,
which was rough and bubbled. A segment from a doper comic had been pasted to
the door—furry people popping pills and hallucinating in technicolor, their
fantasies sexually explicit and excessive.
“Uh huh.”
She knocked several times. When there was no answer
she bit her lip.
“Maybe he went out,” I suggested.
“No. He always stays home when he’s not on call. That
was one thing that bothered me about our relationship. We never went out.”
I didn’t remind her that she’d spotted him in a
restaurant with Nona Swope. No doubt he was one of those men as stingy about
giving as he was greedy about taking. He’d do the least amount possible to
enter a woman’s body. With her lowered expectations, Beverly would have been
his dream. Until he got bored with her.
“I’m worried, Alex. I know he’s in there. He could be
OD’ed on something.”
Nothing I said alleviated her anxiety. Finally, we
went downstairs and convinced the guard to use his master key on the red door.
“I don’t know ’bout this, Doctor,” he said, but he
unlocked the apartment.
The place was a sty. Dirty laundry was piled on the
grubby carpet. The bed was unmade. On the nightstand was an ashtray brimming
with marijuana roaches. Nearby was an engraved roach clip in the shape of a
pair of female legs. Medical books and more doper comics coexisted in the paper
blizzard that covered half the living room floor. The kitchen sink was a swamp
of dirty dishes and cloudy water. A fly circled overhead.
No one was home.
Beverly walked through and unconsciously began
straightening up. The guard looked at her quizzically.
“Come on,” I said with surprising vehemence. “He’s not
here. Let’s get out.”
The guard cleared his throat.
She covered the bed, took a last look around, and
left.
Outside the dorm she asked if we should call the
police.
“What for?” I demanded sharply. “A grown man leaves
his apartment? They’d never take it seriously. And for good reason.”