Dr. Knox (29 page)

Mandy's face was above me—pink and shining and swollen-mouthed. “Jesus,” she whispered, and bit my lower lip.

“Indeed,” I said, and I hoisted her off my lap and back onto her own seat.

“What the fuck?” she said, scowling.

“I need to catch my breath, Mandy.”

She laughed. “What—you want candy and flowers, or something? 'Cause, from what I could tell, you were DTF.”

“I don't even know what that means.”

“
Down to fuck,
Gramps, and don't tell me that you weren't—that you aren't.”

I fumbled with my shirt buttons. “Maybe it's a generational thing, but I'd like to know who exactly you'd be fucking—me or your uncle?”

Mandy straightened her skirt and looked down at her blouse, but didn't bother to close it. “I could ask you the same, Dr. Freud, except that I couldn't care less.”

“Like I said, maybe it's a generational thing.”

Mandy sighed, found her glass, and took another drink. “I think you just like saying no to me, doctor. I think it turns you on a little bit.”

“It's possible you have that backward, Mandy. It's called projecting, if I remember from my psych rotation.”

She raised an eyebrow and smirked at me over her glass. “You may be on to something, Sigmund.” Then she flicked a switch on her armrest and spoke to the driver. “You can stop over by the Urth, Gus. The doctor will get out here.”

The Mercedes pulled to the curb near the corner of Melrose and Westmount. “You're dumping me here?”

“No one rides for free, doc,” she said, chuckling, and pushed open the door with her foot. She was still laughing when the Mercedes rolled away.

I took an Uber home, and along the way didn't think of the heat of Mandy's body, her lips, the dizzying scent of her, but wondered instead about her family—her uncle and her cousins.

Mandy was wrong, I thought, about what had pissed her uncle off enough to send Conti barging into her office to collect me. It wasn't my threat about reporters—we were right in the middle of that discussion when Conti appeared. And I doubted it was our back-and-forth about custody fights—that had taken place only a minute or two earlier. No, what had upset Harris Bray—and maybe what had driven him to war—was something Mandy and I had talked about before that. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was.

When the car dropped me at the clinic, I didn't go in, but went around back to the Dumpster, where my Honda was parked. I looked through the filthy window at the white garbage bag, still slumped on the rear seat. Then I got behind the wheel and started the engine. I dug out my phone before I shifted into drive, and put in a call to Jiffy-Lab.

It was dawn when I said goodbye to Nate Rash and got in my car and pulled onto Third Street. I hadn't slept in twenty-four hours, but my mind was oddly clear as I headed east, as if a stiff ocean breeze had swept away my shaky fatigue, thoughts of impending doom, and any other anxious cobwebs. The sky was pale and brightening ahead of me, and the streets as close to empty as they got. I stopped for an egg sandwich and a bucket of coffee at Bottega Louie, and rolled up to the clinic as Lucho was opening the doors.

I ran my window down, and he walked to the curb. His green scrubs were pressed, but he was not. His skin was sallow, his broad face lined, and there were gray pouches beneath his eyes.

“You're early,” I said.

“Not a lot of sleep goin' on at our place. Artie was at the keyboard all night.”

“He get anywhere?”

Lucho shook his head. “He found footprints or something—I'm not sure what that is—but he said the fuckers who did this were good at it. They didn't make it look like this porn crap was just being stored on his clients' servers; they made it look like the servers were being used to exchange this shit. He still hasn't found the actual files they put out there—he said that'll take more time—and he's still trying to put together some proof that he had nothing to do with any of this.”

“Is he going to reach out to his clients—to explain things, and get ahead of this?”

“We talked about it, but it's not so easy to explain, right? Not without sounding like you're a little crazy yourself. That's why he wants evidence before he gets into it with them—something that'll calm 'em down when they freak. He's afraid some of 'em will call the cops no matter what.”

“Artie could call the cops.”

Lucho squinted at me for a while. “So could you,” he said finally.

I nodded. “Has he thought about a lawyer?”

Lucho rolled his eyes. “We talked about it, but…” Lucho rubbed his thumb over his first two fingers. “We were thinking about Anne Crane. Maybe she'd throw some pro bono our way.”

I nodded, and cursed to myself for not having thought to call her. “I bet she would. I'll phone her.”

Patients started showing up around six-thirty, by which time I'd left a message for Anne, showered and changed, and started coffee brewing in the file room. We were working on the second pot when Lydia appeared. She'd never been so late before, or looked so rumpled or distracted. She offered no explanation of her late arrival, or any word at all beyond asking me about the patients in the waiting room, and the ones I'd seen already. She didn't look at me when she asked, or when I answered.

I filled my coffee mug and took cover in an exam room, hiding behind a line of patients from thoughts of Lydia's anger, Harris Bray's promises, and other shoes dropping. The motley parade marched all day, and the caffeine flowed, and my sense of clarity somehow persisted. Until it shattered into a thousand pieces at around four-thirty that afternoon, when a messenger walked in. He had a clipboard, and sweat stains under the arms of his polyester shirt, and he brought me an eviction notice, which he made me sign for.

“You should've called me, for chrissakes.” Anne Crane let the letter from my new landlord fall to her desk. “Right away—as soon as Bray turned you loose.” We were at Burnham Fiedler's offices—mostly empty on a Saturday—in Anne's gray, glass-walled box. Fading daylight came through the window and fell on a desk cluttered with dog-eared documents, cups from the Coffee Bean, an empty yogurt cup, and a half-eaten salad in a plastic container. Anne wore jeans and a rumpled pink blouse with an umlaut of raspberry jam on it. Her gray hair was pulled into a short, ineffective ponytail.

“What would you have told me?” I asked.

“I don't know—but I would've had twenty-four more hours to think about it, maybe to figure out some things. If nothing else, we'd have had an extra day to find these people—Brickel and Goins—and remind them of the downside of making false accusations.”

“Good luck with that. They don't have addresses, or much of anything else besides the clothes on their backs. They're litigation-proof, Anne, just like Bray.”

“Harris Bray's got plenty of assets.”

“So? Bray's insulated—even I know that. The real estate transactions are separated from him by who knows how many layers of companies, and I'm sure we could look for a long time without finding a link from Bray to what's happened to Arthur and his clients, or to the charges against me and Lydia. His private army is good at that stuff. All these are going to look like discrete events, and I'm the only one to say differently. It'll be my word against his that this is—what—a conspiracy? Coercion? Is there something you would have said to make that argument sound more plausible?”

She picked up the eviction notice again and shook her head. “This is shit, you know. Your lease doesn't permit—”

“This is just a shot across the bow, Anne—the first one. And while you're filing whatever you can file about this, Lucho and Artie are going to get their own eviction notice, and Lydia and I are going to hear from the licensing boards. Not to mention Artie's clients. Speaking of which…”

“I'm not sure what I can do for him. I—Burnham Fiedler—represent the clinic and maybe you personally, if we stretch things. We don't represent your employees or your contractors.”

“But you could, couldn't you?”

“And do what—assuming my masters let me do anything at all?”

“I don't know, help him calm his clients down, maybe. Help him if the cops come around.”

“For that he'll need a criminal lawyer. I don't do—”

“He's a bystander, Anne—they all are. You guys must be able to do something.”

Anne winced. “I'll talk to my bosses. But the bigger question is: what are
you
going to do about all this? This is a world of shit, doctor. Have you thought about—”

“He's not getting the kid—that much I know. Beyond that, I have an idea about getting Mandy to say incriminating things on tape.”

“Why would she do that?”

I shrugged. “She's…weird. And she kind of likes me.” Anne squinted. “She called me last night. She was pretty drunk, and pissed off at Bray, and—”

Anne's squint became a smirk. “She drunk-dialed you? What—she got bored with Tinder?”

I felt my face redden. “The point is: she's not overly fond of her uncle. It turns out, on top of everything else, he's a sexist—big surprise—and Mandy's a disgruntled employee.”

“Poor baby. But is she disgruntled enough to bite the hand?”

“I guess we'll find out, unless you have a better idea.”

Anne picked up one of the cardboard coffee cups on her desk. She looked inside and swirled it around and shook her head slowly. “I got nothing,” she said.

I left Anne wilting in her office with her salad and her documents, and rode the elevator to the garage. She had promised to call after she spoke to her bosses, though she couldn't say how long that would take on a weekend. Still, I was hopeful when my phone chimed as I was unlocking the Honda. I shouldn't have been.

Sutter's voice was low and tense. “I'm in El Segundo,” he said. “You need to get over here.”

“What's happened? Is Elena okay? Alex?”

“Don't know if they're okay, but they are definitely gone.”

I pulled into the driveway behind an SUV and sprinted up the path. The front door was open, and Sutter was in the living room with Yossi, the tall, dark man with Chinese characters on his neck, who looked more sheepish than dangerous now.

Sutter put up his hand like a traffic cop, and I stopped at the doorway while he spoke quietly to Yossi. I couldn't hear what he said, but I saw Yossi go from sheepish to pale and nervous. Yossi nodded as he listened, and when Sutter was done he started to answer. Sutter raised a finger and stopped him. Sutter spoke some more and put a hand on Yossi's shoulder. Yossi nodded again, visibly relieved, then slid past me, out the door.

“You want coffee?” Sutter asked, and walked into the kitchen. I followed.

“Coffee, some clue as to what's going on—either of those would work.”

“They bolted, all three of them,” Sutter said as he scooped coffee into the machine. “Out the bedroom window, over the backyard fence, and—poof. About two hours ago. Yossi thought Elena and the boy were asleep, and that Shelly was taking a bath, and he was mostly watching the street. He's embarrassed as hell, if that makes you feel any better. And he's worried that he won't get any work out of me again. He's got that right, the sloppy fuck.”

“Two hours ago? How far could they get in that time?”

“On foot, figure three miles an hour times two, but we'll find out. I've got Franco and Evie looking.”

I was adding milk to my coffee when the front door opened and Franco walked in, followed by Evie—the sinewy black woman with scars on her forearms. They paused when they saw me, and Sutter waved them on.

“We spiraled out,” Evie said in a heavy French accent, “on foot and in the car. Seven-mile radius, and we got nothing.”

“Maybe not total nothing,” Franco said, and pointed toward the rear of the house. “You know the place behind this one, with the carport? When I'm here before, I always see a pickup in it.”

“Blue Ford,” Sutter said. “Kind of beat up.”

Franco nodded. “That's it. Evie says she thinks the guy lives there works a late shift, comes back late morning, leaves the truck in the carport, sleeps all day, takes off again around nine at night. Truck's not there now, but it's not nine yet. We go up close and find the kitchen door jimmied. I look in—very quiet—I see a wallet on the kitchen floor, looks empty.”

Sutter looked at me and smiled ruefully. “You think they jacked the truck?” I asked.

Franco nodded. “Me and Evie make a bet. I say the blonde did it; she thinks no. But that blonde is tough.”

Evie shook her head. “You know shit about women,
cher.
It was the little dark one, the mother. She watches everything—everybody—all the time. And she plans—you see it in her eyes. Out there in the yard or from the bedroom, I know she sees that house and that truck, that guy on the night shift—same as me.”

“I'm with you,” Sutter said. “I don't guess either of you caught the tags on that Ford.” Franco and Evie shook their heads. “Me neither, but if it was boosted, the guy next door will be calling it in soon. When he does, I can get 'em from a guy I know with the Sheriff's.”

“Which will tell us what?” I asked.

“Tag numbers make finding the truck easier.”

“Isn't that a needle in a haystack in this town?”

“Yeah, but I think we can rule out Holmby Hills and Brentwood. I assume Shelly's driving, and she's gonna go where she knows. What do you know about where Shelly hangs out, or who she hangs with?”

I shrugged. “I've see her on the streets, near the Harney, but I don't think she's going back there anytime soon. As far as friends, Mia's the only one who comes to mind, and, given what Shelly brought to her door last time…”

“Burnt bridges—I get it,” Sutter said. “Still, Mia might be a place to start. You know how to find her?”

“I'll see what contact info we have at the clinic,” I said. “If we have anything.”

Franco and Evie left, and the little house was quiet but for a drip of water from the tap into the kitchen sink—as flat and insistent as a bill collector's knock.

Sutter stared at the sink. “I got to fix that,” he said eventually.

“If Elena's a planner,” I said, “what's her plan?”

He shrugged. “You tell me.”

“She wanted money from the Brays, and passage home for her and the boy. And she wanted an apology.”

“She doesn't strike me as someone who changes her mind easy.”

“But I have no clue how she'd go about pursuing any of that—not on her own, anyway. What's she going to do, go to the press herself? Stake out all the places the Brays live?”

Sutter shook his head. “Who the fuck knows? But I'd focus less on her plans if I were you, and worry more about your own.”

I squinted at him. “What am I missing?”

“Your girl has left you deeper in the shit, brother, if you can believe your shit can get deeper. Even if you wanted to do a deal with Bray, you can't now. And how do you think the old man will react when you tell him you have no idea where his grandkid is? Or when you tell him,
Now that Alex and Elena are in the wind, I got no dog in this fight
? You think he'll say,
Solid, my brother; no harm, no foul, nice doing business with you
?”

“Fuck,” I whispered.

Sutter's smile was tight and grim. He drank his coffee, and the dripping tap held sway again.