“I overheard two women in the gym talking about Dr. Eberhardt. They said he’s the best.”
“We think so,” the girl responds warmly.
I tell her my name is Amanda Griffin and she gives me an appointment for 9:45 the next day.
• • •
From the pile of clothes on the floor in the back of my closet I dig out a pleated gray skirt and cranberry silk blouse, dating from my early days as an agent when I thought the way to get ahead was by dressing smart. After a few undercover assignments where you had to sit in a car on stakeout for ten hours at a stretch I abandoned my suits and heels and started wearing whatever I felt like to work, discovering it was a lot more fun to be one of the boys than an uptight corporate girl. In my jewelry box I find a string of plump fake pearls and in an overstuffed bathroom drawer an old tube of wine red lipstick. It’s kind of a kick, like getting dressed for a play, with the same nervousness. I look in the mirror and the word that comes reflecting back is “straight.” I am pleased with the transformation. It fits Amanda Griffin, who, I have decided, is a legal secretary.
I am swinging a long lost imitation-lizard bag over my shoulder and my keys are in my hand when the phone rings. It is Poppy.
“I can’t talk, I’m on a case, the Jayne Mason thing.”
“I need five minutes of your time.”
“Can I call you back later?”
As usual my assertions are meaningless.
“I want you to go to the bank on Wilshire, what’s it called—”
“Security National?”
I put my keys down on the counter but they are still contained in my clenched fist.
“And get some papers out of my safe-deposit box.”
I force myself to expel the breath I have been holding in frustration.
“I want my birth certificate, my will, everything that’s in there, clean it out.”
“Okay.”
“We’ve got a fight on our hands, Annie.”
Boiling with impatience now, I can just imagine Poppy engaged in a lawsuit with some neighbor who doesn’t like the way he lets his Buick slop over into two parking spaces.
“Can we talk about this later?”
“The doctor says I’ve come down with cancer, but I told him it’s bullshit.”
Some kind of ice-cold chemical flushes through my bowels.
“What do you mean, ‘cancer’?”
“Oh I found some bumps in my neck when I was shaving.”
My fist unclenches. The keys have left deep marks in the flesh of my palm.
“It sounds serious.”
“Uh-uh. Not to worry. This is not the one that takes me down.”
I suddenly have to go to the bathroom. I have to be in Santa Monica in ten minutes.
“I’ll drive out and see you as soon as I can.”
“No need. I’m fine. Just put the papers in the mail. Nothing’s going to happen to me. Go rescue my gal Jayne from the bad guys.”
• • •
Donnato parks at a meter in front of the Dana Orthopedic Clinic.
He opens a briefcase. Inside is a Nagra tape recorder hooked up to a radio receiver. I place the radio transmitter inside the shoulder bag.
“What’s your cover?”
“Amanda Griffin. She’s a legal secretary who lives in Mar Vista with her two cats.” My voice sounds oddly flat.
“Keep it simple,” Donnato admonishes, twisting the plug into his ear. “And whatever you do — don’t entrap the bastard. Talk into your handbag.”
I hum into the radio receiver and the needles on the Nagra jump. Without another word I get out of the car and cross the sidewalk and walk up the steps to Dr. Eberhardt’s office.
I barely have a chance to settle against those curved peach and gray benches when a young woman in a white lab coat opens a door, calling softly, “Amanda Griffin?”
She shows me to an examining room. A cotton gown is folded on the table.
“Take everything off except your panties. Put the gown on with the opening in back. Dr. Eberhardt will be just a few minutes.”
She leaves. I place the bag with the radio transmitter on a chair close to the examining table.
I start taking off my clothes, then realize that I am not wearing panties beneath the carefully chosen daytime sheer neutral panty hose and that I must face the doctor, the criminal suspect of this investigation, totally naked.
Clutching the gown around myself uneasily, I pad barefoot across the spotless linoleum and start looking through cabinets and drawers. I find several shelves filled with a drug called Naprosyn—“Successful management of arthritis,” it says on the cartons — gauze, towels, child-size smocks printed with dinosaurs. All the cabinets are open except for the lower one near the window, which is locked just as Jayne Mason described. My heartbeat increases with the possibility that inside are shoe boxes full of Mexican narcotics.
A knock on the door. I quickly sit in a chair as the doctor comes in.
“Amanda Griffin? I’m Dr. Eberhardt.” A smile, a dry handshake, eyes on Amanda Griffin’s empty chart. “You had a car accident and your back is giving you pain.”
I have seen the subject only that one time across the alley. He is bigger than I remembered but somehow softer too, wearing not a starched white lab coat but loose short-sleeved green hospital scrubs revealing well- developed biceps. His sandy-colored hair is expensively styled and he wears steel-rimmed reading glasses low on the nose. Soft and helpless inside the gown, I shrink from the sense of privilege that emanates from Randall Eberhardt, in his physical assurance and in the firm sense of medical authority that is sealed for the world by the crest on his Harvard class ring.
He casually hops up on the examining table and crosses his feet in big puffy blue paper boots. Peering affably over the glasses, he asks, “How fast were you going when you were hit?”
“I was going nowhere. Some punk rear-ended me when I was stopped for a light. On Cushing Avenue. It happened in Boston.”
“I’m from Boston,” he says. “I know all about Massachusetts drivers.”
He writes on the chart. I watch the muscles in his smooth tan forearms.
“You’re in great shape,” says Amanda Griffin, who is a bit of a dork. “Do they pump iron in Boston?”
“Not like here. I have to work out for two reasons: to practice orthopedics and keep up with my kids.”
“They keep you running, don’t they?”
“My little girl is a climber. I swear she’s part monkey. You come home and she’s sitting on top of the piano. You should see her balancing on the edge of the play structure with the seven-year-olds, it gives me arrhythmia. And quickly her baby brother is following in her footsteps. Were you looking up in the rearview mirror when you were hit?”
“No, I was looking down, trying to read a map.”
“Probably saved your neck from getting whiplash.”
“I don’t have kids, I’m not even married,” volunteers Amanda.
“Kids give you perspective on what’s important.”
“What’s important, doctor?”
“The
“And making a lot of money helps.”
“I like making money,” Randall Eberhardt admits with easy candor, rubbing the side of his nose. “But I don’t
