“Yes, we are.” The panic mounts quickly. “She was lying to us out there in the park.”
“Now that doesn’t make any sense at all.” The more he tries to be reassuring, the more I know the ship is sinking fast. “Why would she make up something like that?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, but we’ve got to find some other substantiation to her claim that Eberhardt overprescribed. Otherwise we have no corroborating witness.”
“I hear what you’re telling me.”
“Did you pull her hospital records?”
“Haven’t had a moment—”
“I’ll do it,” I say abruptly, cutting him off with the touch of a button.
Four minutes later I am talking to Dr. Narayan, Randall Eberhardt’s former boss at New England Deaconess Hospital. He says he will pull Van Hoven’s chart by the afternoon and his lovely measured English accent is filled with promise. In my experience even the most educated people find it a turn-on to ride posse with the FBI.
The Bureau requires us to pass physical fitness tests every six months and you get three hours a week built into your schedule for exercise, so it isn’t goofing off for me to walk across the parking lot to the Westwood Community Recreation Center on Sepulveda and do a twenty-two-minute mile in the public pool. I am so wired there is nothing else but to hurtle myself down a tunnel of water as fast as I can, focusing on the big cross on the opposite wall, taking pleasure in the neat flip turn and the rhythm of the push-off and the glide and the power that comes from those abdominals I’ve been crunching every night; today I have power to spare and even welcome the challenge of the lady in the orange bathing suit paddling down the center of the fast lane, which adds another 10 percent of effort to the workout.
I return to the office with wet hair and all cylinders firing smoothly. After a good swim I am loose enough to cope with anything, which is fortunate because Rosalind has a message waiting for me to call Dr. Narayan in Boston.
“Claudia Van Hoven was treated here for fractures and trauma sustained in an automobile accident,” the doctor tells me enthusiastically. “Before that she had a long history of psychiatric treatment for all sorts of illness from depression to schizophrenia until finally she was hospitalized at Ridgeview Institute in Georgia and accurately diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, which we used to call multiple personality disorder.”
“Hold it. You’re telling me she’s one of those people who takes on different voices and personalities?”
“Right.”
“Isn’t that kind of far out?”
“Dissociative identity disorder is probably more common than you realize. It’s a mechanism for the psyche to avoid trauma by literally becoming another person. In Ms. Van Hoven’s case it seems to have begun in early adolescence, stemming from sexual abuse by a neighbor. From the looks of this record,” he goes on, “twenty-three separate personalities have been documented in the patient, including an aggressive male named Allan.”
“She said Allan was her helper.”
“Yes, some patients refer to certain alters as ‘helpers’—that is, helping personalities. Did you notice any switching when you talked to her?”
“Switching?”
“Did you actually see her become somebody else through a change in voice pattern or physical attitude —”
“Jesus, no.” A chill goes through me.
“Interesting.”
Struggling to get back to understandable reality, “Can we believe what she told us about Dr. Eberhardt?”
“That would be tricky.”
“But she seemed totally rational. She was intelligent and shy — said she played the violin.”
“That was probably her personality named Becky.”
“Did you actually see the baby?”
“No. But it was starting to rain,” as if that explains anything.
Dr. Narayan’s tone is gentle. “I’m sorry to tell you that I doubt very much if there even was a baby in that carriage.”
The idea that she was out there in the cold pretending to be taking care of a baby — and that I bought it — leaves me awed. Finally:
“In your professional opinion, given her condition, is there any way Claudia Van Hoven could make a credible witness in a court of law?”
“Ultimately? Not a chance.”
I hang up the phone and take my head in my hands, hoping to crush my temples together into an unrecognizable mass. The sleeves and chest of the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise hanging on the coatrack nearby are puffed out and stiff as if filled with expanding hot air.
I have no corroborating witness.
And Galloway is expecting results tomorrow.
I could whine to my boss that I had been guaranteed the Van Hoven gal was good, but that the old drunk in Boston screwed up by not checking her out. As angry as I am right now, I can’t bring myself to give up Wild Bill. A letter of censure would only jeopardize his retirement and besides it would not solve my problem, which is to present hard evidence of Randall Eberhardt’s guilt.
For a long time I sit there with my mind scrambling like a rat inside a wall pawing with needle nails. I make notes, I make charts, but I can’t see how to make a case against the doctor. All we have is an actress’s unconfirmed story. Then the phone rings and it is Jayne Mason herself.
She is the last person I want to talk to. I’m not interested in helicopters flying over her property, or maybe this time it’s a late garbage collection she wants me to fix.
Surprisingly, she is totally contrite. She needs to talk to me but doesn’t want to go into it further on the telephone, may we meet?
Since, the last time, it took about a month to arrange a meeting and then she showed up a week early and at a completely different location, I am somewhat grouchy and suspicious of the entire venture, but she promises her car will pick me up in front of the Federal Building at 4:45 that afternoon, and it does.
• • •
It quickens the heartbeat to walk past the crowd to a shiny black limousine waiting just for me. Heads turn. I feel giddy and a dufus grin has plastered itself across my face.
Tom Pauley opens the door with a knowing nod. It’s not like climbing into a car, it’s like entering a room, a room that smells of lipstick and fine leather, with pearly white panels of light glowing around the edges, a chrome shelf holding crystal decanters with silver tags around their necks — Whiskey, Rye, Gin. I can stretch out my legs and still be miles away from the state-of-the-art console with built-in TV, VCR, CD player, and tape deck, above which a sheet of dark glass separates us from the driver. There are two telephones, a fax, and even a clip-on holder for what looks like a long test tube that holds one yellow rose. As we leave the curb a row of glasses tinkles against a mirrored backlight and a pile of scripts slides across a miniature kilim rug, spreading itself out like a fan.
“Thank you for coming, Ana, dear.”
Jayne Mason, fully made up with Parisian red lips and dark shadowed eyes, hair pinned up in a twist, briefly puts her hand on mine, then turns back toward the window with a pensive stare. She is wearing hot pink silky trousers with white heels and a hot pink silk T-shirt underneath a white blazer with the sleeves pushed up. There is a multitude of gold bangles on each wrist and around her neck a pearl choker with some sort of sparkly thing hanging off (it’s hard to see in the soft light). She looks like she means business, in a Palm Springs sort of way. Sitting so close I can catch her body scent — like a lingerie drawer spiced by a clove sachet.
It is easy to picture how Randall Eberhardt was drawn into this sultry female womb, accompanying Miss Mason to exclusive fundraiser dinners, wheeling around town in a private bubble, protected by one-way tinted glass. As I observe a group of office workers waiting for a light to change on Wilshire Boulevard, I realize that the ability
