Dark Rivers of the Heart

“Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Miss Traven.”

“Oh, she works the early shift at Caesars Palace. Won’t be home for hours yet.”

She moved into the doorway: a short, plump, sweet-faced woman in clunky orthopedic shoes, support stockings as thick as dinosaur hide, a yellow-and-gray housedress, and a forest-green cardigan.

Spencer said, “Well, who I’m really looking for is—”

Rocky, hiding behind Spencer, risked poking his head around his master’s legs to get a look at the grandmotherly soul from 2-E, and the old woman squealed with delight when she spotted him. Although she toddled more than walked, she launched herself off the threshold with the exuberance of a child who didn’t know the meaning of the word “arthritis.” Burbling baby talk, she approached at a velocity that startled Spencer and alarmed the hell out of Rocky. The dog yelped, the woman bore down on them with exclamations of adoration, the dog tried to climb Spencer’s right leg as if to hide under his jacket, the woman said “Sweetums, sweetums, sweetums,” and Rocky dropped to the balcony floor in a swoon of terror and curled into a ball and crossed his forepaws over his eyes and prepared himself for the inevitability of violent death.

* * *

Bosley Donner’s left leg slipped off the foot brace on his electric wheelchair and scraped along the walkway. Laughing, letting his chair coast to a halt, Donner lifted his unfeeling leg with both hands and slammed it back where it belonged.

Equipped with a high-capacity battery and a golf-cart propulsion system, Donner’s transportation was capable of considerably greater speeds than any ordinary electric wheelchair. Roy Miro caught up with him, breathing heavily.

“I told you this baby can move,” Donner said.

“Yes. I see. Impressive,” Roy puffed.

They were in the backyard of Donner’s four-acre estate in Bel Air, where a wide ribbon of brick-colored concrete had been installed to allow the disabled owner to access every corner of his elaborately landscaped property. The walkway rose and fell repeatedly, passed through a tunnel under one end of the pool patio, and serpentined among phoenix palms, queen palms, king palms, huge Indian laurels, and melaleucas in their jackets of shaggy bark. Evidently, Donner had designed the walkway to serve as his private roller coaster.

“It’s illegal, you know,” Donner said.

“Illegal?”

“It’s against the law to modify a wheelchair the way I’ve done.”

“Well, yes, I can see why it would be.”

“You can?” Donner was amazed. “I can’t. It’s my chair.”

“Whipping around this track the way you do, you could wind up not just a paraplegic but a quadriplegic.”

Donner grinned and shrugged. “Then I’d computerize the chair so I could operate it with vocal commands.”

At thirty-two, Bosley Donner had been without the use of his legs for eight years, after taking a chunk of shrapnel in the spine during a Middle East police action that had involved the unit of U.S. Army Rangers in which he had served. He was stocky, deeply tanned, with brush-cut blond hair and blue-gray eyes that were even merrier than Roy’s. If he’d ever been depressed about his disability, he had gotten over it long ago — or maybe he’d learned to hide it well.

Roy disliked the man because of his extravagant lifestyle, his annoyingly high spirits, his unspeakably garish Hawaiian shirt — and for other reasons not quite definable. “But is this recklessness socially responsible?”

Donner frowned with confusion, but then his face brightened. “Oh, you mean I might be a burden to society. Hell, I’d never use government health care anyway. They’d triage me into the grave in six seconds flat. Look around, Mr. Miro. I can pay what’s necessary. Come on, I want to show you the temple. It’s really something.”

Rapidly gaining speed, Donner streaked away from Roy, downhill through feathery palm shadows and spangles of red-gold sunshine.

Straining to repress his annoyance, Roy followed.

After being discharged from the army, Donner had fallen back on a lifelong talent for drawing inventive cartoon characters. His portfolio had won him a job with a greeting card company. In his spare time, he developed a comic strip and was offered a contract by the first newspaper syndicate to see it. Within two years, he was the hottest cartoonist in the country. Now, through those widely loved cartoon characters — which Roy found idiotic — Bosley Donner was an industry: best-selling books, TV shows, toys, T-shirts, his own line of greeting cards, product endorsements, records, and much more.

At the bottom of a long slope, the walkway led to a balustraded garden temple in the classical style. Five columns stood on a limestone floor, supporting a heavy cornice and a dome with a ball finial. The structure was surrounded by English primrose laden with blossoms in intense shades of yellow, red, pink, and purple.

Donner sat in his chair, in the center of the open-air temple, swathed in shadows, waiting for Roy. In that setting, he should have been a mysterious figure; however, his stockiness and broad face and brush-cut hair and loud Hawaiian shirt all combined to make him seem like one of his own cartoon characters.

Stepping into the temple, Roy said, “You were telling me about Spencer Grant.”

“Was I?” Donner said with a note of irony.

In fact, for the past twenty minutes, while leading Roy on a chase around the estate, Donner had said quite a lot about Grant — with whom he had served in the Army Rangers — and yet had said nothing that revealed either the inner man or any important details of his life prior to joining the army.

“I liked Hollywood,” Donner said. “He was the quietest man I’ve ever known, one of the most polite, one of the smartest — and sure as hell the most self-effacing. Last guy in the world to brag. And he could be a lot of fun when he was in the right mood. But he was very self-contained. No one ever really got to know him.”

“Hollywood?” Roy asked.

“That’s just a name we had for him, when we wanted to kid him. He loved old movies. I mean, he was almost obsessed with them.”

“Any particular kind of movies?”

“Suspense flicks and dramas with old-fashioned heroes. These days, he said, movies have forgotten what heroes are all about.”

“How so?”

“He said heroes used to have a better sense of right and wrong than they do now. He loved North by Northwest, Notorious, To Kill a Mockingbird, because the heroes had strong principles, morals. They used their wits more than guns.”

“Now,” Roy said, “you have movies where a couple of buddy cops smash and shoot up half a city to get one bad guy—”

“—use four-letter words, all kinds of trash talk—”

“—jump into bed with women they met only two hours ago—”

“—and strut around with half their clothes off to show their muscles, totally full of themselves.”

Roy nodded. “He had a point.”

“Hollywood’s favorite old movie stars were Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, so of course he took a lot of ribbing about that.”

Roy was surprised that his and the scarred man’s opinions of current movies were in harmony. He was disturbed to find himself in agreement on any issue with a dangerous sociopath like Grant.

Thus preoccupied, he’d only half heard what Donner had told him. “I’m sorry — took a lot of ribbing about what?”

“Well, it wasn’t particularly funny that Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant must’ve been his mom’s favorite stars too, or that she named him after them. But a guy like Hollywood, as modest and quiet as he was, shy around girls, a guy who didn’t hardly seem to have an ego — well, it just struck us funny that he identified so strongly with a couple of movie stars, the heroes they played. He was still nineteen when he went into Ranger training, but in most ways he seemed twenty years older than the rest of us. You could see the kid in him