Deadline (7 page)

‘Look, I'm really pressured for time right now,' I said. ‘Can't this wait?'

I was thinking about the voice on the phone and the cocktail bar where I'd been commanded to go, and I longed to be outside in the smoggy sunlight. Petrosian didn't seem interested in what I said.

‘You left the scene before anyone could question you,' he said. ‘The perpetrator managed to get away.'

‘I'm not a cop, it's not my job to arrest people.'

‘It took the patrol car four minutes to reach you,' he said. ‘Which I consider a fast response time. But you didn't hang around, did you? You didn't wait.'

I stepped past the detective, moved towards the doors. ‘Talk to me later. Call my office. Make an appointment.'

‘You always in a hurry, doc? I appreciate you're a busy guy, but this is only going to take five minutes tops.'

‘I'm in … look, it's an emergency,' and I kept moving.

I thought of saying:
It's like this, Petrosian, a stranger's voice on the phone tells me my wife has been kidnapped, get the picture
?
Please help me.
But I said no such thing. I stepped outside, and he came after me.

‘You get a look at the assailant, doc?'

‘No, his face was concealed.'

‘How?'

‘He had a scarf wrapped round his mouth.' I couldn't keep the impatience out of my voice.

‘And he assaulted you in what way?'

‘This is going to have to wait, Petrosian. I mean that.'

‘How did he assault you?'

‘You don't take no, do you? OK. He punched me here,' and I pointed to the side of my neck. ‘Then he tried to knife me.'

‘You fought him off?' Petrosian said.

‘There was a confrontation, sure.' I moved along the sidewalk through the thick air. The details of an assault, for Christ's sake – what did they matter? Petrosian kept coming after me; he had the persistence of a force of nature.

‘You'd say it was a straightforward attempted mugging,' he said.

‘I can't imagine what else it would be. Money. Drugs. That would be my best guess.'

Petrosian scribbled in a little brown notebook. ‘This knife. Did you disarm him? Or did he run off with it in his possession?'

‘I remember he dropped it.' I looked across the parking-lot, trying to recall the precise spot where I'd had the encounter last night. ‘It fell under my car. Maybe it's still lying in the same place.' I pointed a little vaguely to one of the tall lampposts.

Petrosian held my elbow and said, ‘Show me the spot, doc.'

‘Jesus, I keep telling you, I don't have time. Anyway, I'm not sure I remember.'

‘Try. One minute is all I ask. Support your local cops. Remember, we're the only thing that stands between you and outright anarchy, doc.' The lips extended into a smile.

I half-ran, half-walked to where I thought I'd parked last night. So many parking spaces, so many lamps – how could I be certain?

The knife was on the ground, lying at the center of an old oil stain that looked like a blackened map of Scandinavia. Taking a plastic baggie from his pocket to avoid direct contact with it, Petrosian picked up the knife and examined it. I noticed the weapon had a dark rubber handle.

Then Petrosian unexpectedly pressed the tip of the knife firmly with a finger; the blade disappeared inside the handle and there was the faint sound of a spring being compressed. He laughed. ‘A prop,' he said, and looked at me. ‘A stage dagger. I'll be damned.'

‘I was threatened by a
toy
knife?'

Petrosian said, ‘Hey, this is LA. You expect every mugger you see to carry a
real
weapon?' He dropped the fake knife into the plastic baggie. ‘I'll check it for prints, anyhow.'

A fake knife. A whiff of cologne. What was I supposed to make out of that? ‘Can I go now?'

‘Sure. If we need to talk again, I'll be in touch.'

I walked away from him quickly. I was aware of him watching me. I turned once to look back and saw him examining the toy knife in the baggie; he had an odd little smile on his face. He may have been thinking:
Hotshot LA shrink spooked by dummy knife.

When I was out of his sight, I broke into a trot, a run. The idea of Sondra in trouble was burning like a brush-fire inside my head, and I was impatient to get to the cocktail bar – where, God willing, I'd find that the kidnap was as authentic as the mugger's weapon.

11.29 a.m.

The Punch Bowl was a dim, old-fashioned little cocktail bar, an anachronism I'd passed thousands of times without ever really noticing it. Red naugahyde booths lined the walls and signed photographs of old prizefighters hung everywhere: Marciano, Graziano, Sugar Ray Robinson. Hence The Punch Bowl, but I wasn't in any mood for cute.

A couple of guys sat on stools at the bar; late morning drinkers, maybe two men having a hair of the dog, or just getting a buzz before lunch. They turned to register me when I came through the door, then went back to their conversation, which was low and mumbled. I caught a few words –
she's way too skinny
…
she's been doing coke, you ask me
– and I wondered,
What am I here for?
It must be a hoax, something dreamed up by Harry when he'd had too much cognac one night and his brain was churning out idly elaborate notions.

Why was I playing along with it?

Because it's serious. You're not treating it as a bad joke, are you, Jerry? You want to. But you can't. Something tells you not to.

The barman appeared, a muscular young black guy wearing a navy-blue T-shirt with a sparkly logo that read
The Punch Bowl
on the chest. ‘Help you?' he asked.

‘Scotch,' I said.

‘Ice? Soda?'

‘Yes,' I said. Ice, soda, it didn't matter.

I watched him pour. I took a long drink, tried to still my hand. I looked around the bar, which was long and narrow and receded into impenetrable shadow at the rear. So far as I could see, there were no customers other than me and the two guys on the stools. I sat down in a booth facing the front door.

My hand still shook. Outside traffic rumbled past, all very ordinary – people making deliveries, going to offices, running errands, whatever it was the human race did in the mundane slipstream of life. I couldn't see through the opaque glass panes of the door, I could only hear noise: wheels, the squeak of brakes suddenly applied, mechanical splutters, gears grinding. I sat inside a dark box listening to a world of noise. At the bar, one guy absently tapped a coin on the counter, his companion breathed with a slight whine through congested nostrils, the barman ran a finger round the rim of a glass.

The world roared at me. I was floating on a great ocean of noise.

I looked at my watch. It was eleven-thirty now. OK, I was here, I'd been punctual, what happened next? The door would open – light would penetrate the gloom, and Harry would come through with Sondra, and they'd be laughing.
Oh, look at Mr Serious and 'ow long 'is face is
, Harry would say in that European-accented English he'd never lost. Then, sounding like a Nazi in a low-budget war-movie:
Vee have given de poor doktor somezing of a fright, my dear Mrs Lomax.

But the door didn't open and the second-hand of my watch kept marking the time until eleven-thirty became eleven thirty-five, then forty. And still it kept moving. Heraclitus had got it all wrong. Time wasn't a river. It was a torturer's rack. The motion of the second-hand was like the old Chinese water-drip. The watch vibrated in my vision.

I'd been here for more than ten minutes. I took a couple of very deep breaths and tried to relax, but my muscles felt padlocked.

‘Willie, the same again,' one of the guys at the bar said. He turned to look at me a moment, then lost interest.

The telephone rang. I heard Willie pick it up and say, ‘Punch Bowl. What can we do for you?' He listened a moment, then looked in my direction. ‘Say, are you Jerry Lomax? Somebody here wants to speak with you.'

I got out of the booth, trying not to hurry. I took the cordless phone from Willie's hand and walked away from the bar, turning my back on the three men. They were listening. They'd fallen silent, unintentionally or otherwise. Maybe they wanted to hear what I said. Maybe the guys on the stools were involved in this – but that was a crazy tapestry I didn't want to start working on, a mad design with no end in sight.

‘This is Lomax,' I said.

‘You keep good time.' It was the same man who'd spoken to me in my office.

I said, ‘Put my wife on.'

‘That's not possible at the moment.'

‘Put her on the line or I hang up.'

‘You hang up and I might not call you again. And then you'd never find your wife, would you? You'd look and you'd look. All the days of your life. And you'd never find her.'

He was goading me, cruelly correct. ‘What do you want?'

‘You leave The Punch Bowl. You head for home.'

‘Then what?'

‘Then I send you somewhere else. Call it Point B. You get to B and perhaps I'll send you to C. That's how it works, Lomax. You go here and there, and when I'm sure you're following instructions, I decide it's time to tell you exactly what I want.'

‘And what the fuck
do
you want? Spell it out, for Christ's sake. I hate this cloak –'

‘Just do what you're told and we'll get along famously. Go home. Go back to your house. Wait there.'

‘I want to speak to my wife –'

‘Realize something, Lomax. You're dealing with some serious people. And if you want to see your wife again, you better grasp that fact damn fast. Oh, one last thing, at the risk of repeating myself: You don't talk to a soul. You got that? Not a living soul.'

Then the connection was severed abruptly, and the receiver in my hand became a purposeless lump of plastic. I passed it back to Willie, who hung it up and then asked, ‘You OK?'

‘I'm OK,' I said.

‘You need another drink?'

I shook my head. He shrugged and wandered to the other end of the bar. I picked up the handset and gazed at the numerical pad.

Willie looked at me. ‘That a local call you're planning to make?'

I said it was.

‘It's just that we get assholes phoning Peru and New Zealand, sticking us with tabs.'

‘No Peru. No New Zealand. Just LA.'

I punched in the number of Sondra's office. I knew she'd pick up. I would have bet good money on it. She'd say
Hi, Jerry, what's happening?
or,
Hey, Daddy-to-be, what's up?
and all the pieces of the world that had splintered in the last thirty minutes would come together again. Everything would be whole. This entire kidnap scenario would be a big unfunny gag.

I just goddam
knew.

Martina said, ‘Sondra Lomax's office.'

‘Martina, let me speak to my wife.'

‘She didn't come in this morning, Jerry.'

‘What does that mean exactly, Martina? Did she call and say she was sick? Is she taking a meeting somewhere? What does it mean, “She didn't come in”?'

‘Uh, just that, Jerry. No phone calls. I don't see anything in her appointments book either. She didn't come in.'

‘Could she be someplace else in the building?'

‘If she is, I haven't seen her,' Martina said.

‘Page her,' I said. ‘It's important.'

‘Hold a minute, Jerry.'

I closed my eyes. Waited. I heard an ice-cube crack in a glass.

Martina came back on the line. ‘Nobody's seen her, Jerry,' she said.

‘And nobody knows where she is?' I asked.

‘Apparently not. Look, if she comes in or if she calls, I'll have her contact you. OK?'

‘Do that,' I said. I kept my eyes shut because I felt them fill with water and I didn't want the guys at the bar to see I was upset. I didn't want questions, I didn't want interference, I didn't want people to say,
Jesus Christ, he's in a hell of a state.
Guys from blue-collar Buffalo didn't cry.

I cut the connection. I wondered who else I might call. Her hairdresser? Her masseuse? Goddam, I couldn't remember their names, anyway. And she hadn't mentioned anything at breakfast about a haircut or a massage.

I went outside just as a dark cloud in the shape of a clenched fist drifted across the sun, and the city was immersed in momentary shadow. Then there was a vague tremor underfoot, a quake in the earth so mild it would barely register on the Richter scale; in a seismic recording-station somewhere a needle would tremble on graph-paper, a blip signifying a mild disturbance in the earth's crust.

I wondered what that needle would record if it could measure the turbulence in me.

12.05 p.m.

I drove homeward. My head throbbed. Pain burned behind my eyes. I needed to anchor myself, drag myself up out of this whole terrifying swampland into which I'd been sucked. OK: a few hours ago I'd said goodbye to my wife, my
pregnant
wife, and I'd driven to my office. I'd talked with a patient and then the two characters from DC – and then the telephone rang, and I'd spoken to a man I didn't know who had uttered a few words that had stuck a sharp shaft of cold steel into the heart of my whole world.

I pressed buttons on my cellphone. Consuela answered. I'd half-hoped to hear Sondra; but no.

‘Consuela, is there a message from Sondra?' I asked.

‘Nope, no message, nothing,' she said. She sounded suspicious. Did she detect in my voice that something was wrong? ‘Why?'

‘Take the rest of the day off. Go home. Relax.'

‘I got plenty stuff to do here,' she said. ‘I got laundry and things like that.'

‘Forget it, do it tomorrow.'

‘What's up with you? You sick? Gotta flu, somptin like that?'