'Hello, there, Guy. Could you use a lift?'
He looked up at me out of dull eyes that had no spark of life left in them. 'Oh, it's you, Mr. Beaumont. I'm waiting for a cab. I can walk, but I have strict orders from that idiotic nurse over there not to step out of this thing until the cab gets here.'
'Where are you going?'
'The Red Lion,' he said. 'Out along the freeway. I screwed up the undercarriage on my Mazda. They had to order in a special part from L.A. It'll be ready later this afternoon.'
'If you want, I can take you wherever you're going.'
He nodded gratefully. 'I'd sure appreciate it. This place makes my skin crawl.'
We canceled the cab dispatch. I brought the Porsche around, and a very brusque, businesslike nurse supervised Guy Lewis' transfer from wheelchair to automobile. The man breathed a sigh of relief when the door closed, effectively shutting the nurse out and us in.
'You saved my life,' he breathed. 'If I'd been stuck in that lobby for another ten minutes, I would have gotten up and gone looking for the nearest bar.'
'We both know that's a bad idea,' I told him.
'Yes,' he said. 'I guess we do.'
On the way to the hospital, I had considered dozens of possible ways to begin asking the necessary questions, but that was before I saw how frail Guy seemed. How could a man who looked as though he would be bowled over by a strong breeze hold up under one barrage of questions after another-not only from me, but also from Gordon Fraymore? Studying him, I wondered if the incident of arrhythmia was more life-threatening than I'd been led to believe.
'What brings you to Medford?' he asked, eyeing me suspiciously. 'Twelfth-stepping?'
I shrugged, uncomfortable with his use of A.A. jargon. I hadn't come calling on Guy Lewis in a single-minded effort to save him from Demon Rum.
'After a fashion, I suppose. I have a plane to catch later on, around five. That left me with an hour or two to kill.'
'How did you know I was here?'
'One of my friends in Seattle. The story about Daphne was in the papers up there this morning. I don't know how he found out about you.'
When Guy heard my answer, he made a strange, strangled sound-a choking, hiccuping noise. I looked at him anxiously, thinking maybe the heart problem had returned. Instead, he slouched against the far car door, sobbing.
At last he pulled himself together. 'She's dead,' he said brokenly. 'I don't know how I'll get through all this- making the arrangements, planning a funeral. Some things you never expect to do. Look at me. I'm twenty-three years older than she was, and overweight besides. I don't exercise, and I've had a heart condition for years. I'm the one who should be dead.'
With that he broke down again. To hear Guy's anguished sobs and see his quaking body was to experience misery made manifest. Daphne Lewis might have had much to answer for in this life, but her passing had left behind a man stricken by the rampant paralysis of grief. It was impossible not to be touched by his overwhelming suffering-touched and awed.
I believe younger people-those in their twenties and thirties-assume passion will more or less disappear over time. They expect that, with age, raw emotion gradually slips out of our lives, gliding silently from view the way a molting snake abandons the shell of last year's useless skin. Here was Guy Lewis-a heavyset, balding man in an improbably gaudy orange Hawaiian shirt-weeping uncontrollably. At his age-the far end of fifty-one might expect anguished passion to surface as only a rare comic anomaly.
But there was no pretense in the sorrow that etched Guy's face, no playacting in the way he huddled miserably in my car, no phoniness to his hurt. For all Daphne's faults, Guy Lewis had loved his second wife-loved her wildly, with-holding nothing. And that's when I realized something about his arrhythmia episode-something an empathetic doctor might possibly have already recognized. What had been observed medically on high tech EKG monitors was nothing more or less than the outward symptom of a newly broken heart.
When we arrived at the Red Lion, Guy was still in no condition to talk, so I left him in the 928 under a shaded portico and used my own AmEx card to check him in. I explained to the big-eyed young desk clerkette that Mr. Lewis had lost his wife and that the remainder of the check-in procedures would have to be handled when he was better able to deal with them.
As soon as we made it into the room, Guy disappeared into the bathroom for a much-needed shower, while I called room service to order coffee and sandwiches. I know enough about the internal workings of hospitals to realize that they routinely plug you full of decaf and call it the real thing. It's no wonder people come out of hospitals feeling worse than when they went in. They're all suffering from severe caffeine withdrawal.
When Guy Lewis emerged from the shower, he may have felt better, but his looks hadn't improved. The room-service food was already waiting on the table. He sat down in front of one of the two cracked-pepper meat- loaf sandwiches. He looked at it distractedly, making no move to pick it up. I poured a cup of coffee and bodily placed it in his hand.
'Drink some of this,' I said. 'It'll do you good.'
Mechanically, like a child doing as it's been told, he took a sip and swallowed it. The steaming brown liquid could have scalded his tongue with second-degree burns, and he wouldn't have noticed. He slammed the cup back into the saucer with such force I was surprised it didn't shatter into a million pieces. Coffee slopped in all directions.
'That's part of what's killing me,' he said hoarsely. 'It's going to come out now, isn't it?'
'What's going to come out?' I asked.
'All the rumors.'
If ever there was a time for feigned innocence, this was it. 'What rumors?' I asked.
'There are all kinds of stories about Daphne's past. Some of them are true. But no matter what they say, she wasn't a gold digger who was only after me for my money. She liked the money fine. Who wouldn't? And she may have had her little flings now and again, but Daphne loved me, dammit! I know she did.'
'I'm sure she did,' I agreed.
'I don't want to talk about it,' he continued as though I hadn't spoken. 'I hate the very idea but I have to. I need to talk to someone. Whatever I tell you is in confidence, isn't it, the same as if I said it in a meeting?'
That was putting it to me. 'Yes,' I said.
'Years ago, when Daphne was a struggling young woman, she got her start making movies. I guess you could call them naughty movies.'
Calling child pornography 'naughty' is like calling television 'intellectual.' The two words don't belong in the same sentence. I would term the coupling of a middle-aged man and a prepubescent girl vile or repulsive, to say nothing of illegal. I wouldn't say it was naughty. I wondered if Guy Lewis had ever seen any of the movies in question. And I questioned whether or not he knew about Daphne's role in the forced servitude of Tanya Dunseth and the production of Dinky Holloway's videotape. If he didn't yet know any of those awful details, he would shortly.
'It must have been at least fifteen years ago now,' he continued. 'Daphne and I have been together for ten. This was long before that.'
I added up the numbers in my head. They didn't exactly tally with what Tanya had told us, but I let it pass.
'Now, according to Detective Fraymore, it's all going to come out in the open. He as good as told me there's nothing I can do to stop it. That young woman in jail-the one who played Juliet, as a matter of fact-was in some of those same kinds of movies. According to Fraymore, there was a connection of some sort between Daphne and this Tanya person. Fraymore says Tanya just all of a sudden freaked out and started killing people.'
'What about the man who was killed? Was he involved in the movies, too?'
Guy Lewis' eyes darkened. 'I don't want to talk about him. You're a police officer, Mr. Beaumont, so I'm sure you'll understand this if I tell you. I believe that man was somehow black-mailing Daphne. Maybe he and that Tanya did it together. I don't know. I just know that when I saw them together…'
His voice trailed off. By sheer force of will, he bit back another sob.
