Daughter of Darkness (22 page)

    "Well, maybe I wouldn't be making decisions like this if he was a better husband."

    "Maybe. Again, I can't decide for you."

    "You don't approve, do you?"

    "I'm not here to approve or disapprove."

    "You know, that's such bullshit. I mean, I'm sorry for being so blunt. But it really
is
so much bullshit. You always say that, that you're not here to approve or disapprove, but I can always tell when you like something and when you don't."

    And then the time was up, Priscilla's small gold Bulova wristwatch chiming the hour discreetly.

    "I hate that damned thing," Heather said.

    "My watch?"

    "Yes, your watch. I mean, if it's going to
ring,
it should
ring
.
But it just make that tiny little noise. It's irritating is what it is. I'm sorry."

    "No reason to be sorry."

    "I'm starting my period."

    "Really?" Priscilla said drolly. "I hadn't noticed." And then felt guilty. True, Heather was a lousy wife. But her husband was an equally lousy mate. She shouldn't be so judgmental when it came to Heather. Girls just want to have fun.

    At the open door, Heather apologized three times and then gave Priscilla a Hollywood-style air kiss. "I'll be a lot nicer next week." Then she was gone.

    

    

    In Priscilla's office, the phone rang. She prayed it wasn't an emergency, somebody with a slashed wrist, or a compulsion to jump off a tall building or swallow forty-seven Prozacs.

    She went in and picked up. Glenda, her secretary-receptionist, would be gone by now. She didn't blame her. Glenda had three kids and tried very hard to be a good mother. She rarely got to leave at the appointed hour and frequently had to stay very late, letting her husband get the kids at the sitter and start dinner at home.

    She picked up, and a familiar voice said, "She's all over the news."

    "I noticed that."

    "Every cop in Chicago is looking for her."

    "Yes," Priscilla said. "Poor Jenny."

    "Oh, yes," the voice responded. "Poor Jenny. Isn't it just terrible?"

    "You're really enjoying this, aren't you?"

    "Aren't you?"

    Patricia smiled. "Yes; yes, I guess I am."

    

    

    In the restaurant booth behind them, a woman who looked as if she would soon be a guest on one of the trashier talk shows ("My Hubby was Humpin' my Stepdaughter And Within-holdin' Hisself From Me!") was chastising her son for not eating all his food. "You don't eat that food, John Henry, Momma's gonna take you out to the car and slap you so hard your mouth'll start bleedin'." That had been the first threat. The second one had gone: "You know what yer gonna make yer Momma do, John Henry? Yer gonna make your Momma take you out to the car and use that switchblade Daddy keeps in the glove compartment." The latest, just now, ran: "John Henry, you're lucky I don't pour gasoline all over your arm and light it."

    Jenny laughed. She had a nice, soft laugh and it was nice to hear it. "I think she should at least drown him."

    "Or disembowel him."

    "Or draw and quarter him."

    "Or hang him."

    "Or crucify him."

    "You just got to teach these kids today a lesson," he said. Then, "Where's a social worker when you really need one?"

    "God, don't mention social workers to my father. He hates I them."

    "Well, I'm not crazy about a lot of them," he said. "I had to work with some of them back in my cop days. Most of them were lazy and sanctimonious and didn't know what they were doing. The day I gave up was when a social worker recommended returning an eight-year-old girl to the same stepfather who'd been molesting her for two years. The social worker had interviewed the father twice and thought she'd 'changed' him."

    Just then, the noise of a sharp slap overwhelmed all the other sounds in the family restaurant. The sound sickened both Coffey and Jenny. John Henry started to cry but Momma said, "You cry, and you get another one, y'hear me?" John Henry quit crying.

    She loomed over their booth a few seconds later. Momma did, a chunky, unkempt woman with wild, graying hair and a soiled pink running suit so tight it show every ounce of excess flesh the woman carried. But it was the eyes that got Coffey. They should have been crazed, angry eyes. Instead, they were ineffably sad eyes, eyes that revealed that she had been raised just as brutally as she was now raising John Henry. Coffey didn't quite hate her anymore. He just wished there were some way of getting John Henry away from her.

    She stuffed John Henry's arms into a tiny denim jacket-he couldn't have been more than two years old-and then yanked him savagely down the aisle, toward the front of the restaurant and the cash register.

    When he looked over at Jenny, he saw that she was watching the John Henry episode with tears in her eyes.

    "I'm sorry," Coffey said, "that kind of stuff can really get you down."

    She shook her head. "It's not just that. It's memories of being in the psychiatric hospital. Some of the patients there. They were pretty sad."

    Then she told him about Quinlan, her doctor, and how he'd fallen in love with her and pursued her romantically all the time she was hospitalized. When she told her parents, they thought she was just confusing professional concern for seduction.

    "I've never met anybody like him," she said as they sat quietly, listening to the sounds of the restaurant winding down for the night, busboys loading up rubber tubs with dirty dishes, waitresses wiping down booths and tables, the cashier ringing up the last sales of the day. "First of all, he's one of the most handsome men I've ever seen. Sort of an Ivy League version of Warren Beatty. His charisma is really sexual as much as anything else and women fall in love with him instantly. Second of all, he's one of the smoothest talkers I've ever heard. He can tell you very strange things and make them seem perfectly reasonable and sensible. He has that gift. And third of all, he's a very sympathetic listener. When he focuses on you, you feel completely flattered. And when he tries to help you with a problem you're struggling with, he offers you a little advice, and everything seems to be fine. At the time, anyway. He just seems so wise and-profound. There's no other way to say it."

    "Sounds like he should run for President."

    "This is all before you get to know him very well."

    "I see "

    "
After
you get to know him is a very different matter. He spends a good share of the day talking on the phone to his stockbroker, and the other part seducing all the pretty young things who come into the hospital. It's sort of an initiation rite, having a thing."

    "You sound cynical."

    "I am," she said, her voice steel. "Very cynical. I walked past his office one day and saw him making out with the one of the other patients."

    She stared down at her cup. She'd passed on the last round of coffee the waitress offered. Too much coffee gave her gas and indigestion.

    "I wouldn't sleep with him. As I said, I found him very appealing and seductive but I immediately felt that there was something wrong with all the women sleeping with him."

    "He could be reported to the medical board and lose his license."

    "I don't think so. He's
very
well connected. He's a good personal friend of the governor, for instance. He runs his place like a private domain. Plus, he's been very successful in treating criminally-insane patients. He's an important man."

    "So Quinlan gave up on seducing you?"

    She stared at her empty coffee cup for a silent time, then said slowly, "He could have drugged me. But that wouldn't have been good for his ego. He needed to feel he'd
conquered
me." She smiled. "He told people that I wouldn't sleep with him because I was insane. I'd made the mistake of telling him that I was hearing voices from time to time."

    "Voices in your head?"

    "Yes."

    Coffey thought of what his shrink friend had said about Jenny being a multiple. But how this multiple seemed artificially imposed somehow, like brainwashing.

    "Any other symptoms?" he said.

    "Symptoms?"

    "Sounds like you were having a psychotic episode of some kind."

    "I think he was putting something in my water or something like that."

    "Possibly." He didn't want to tell her what Hal thought. Not yet, anyway. "So when did you leave the hospital?"

    "After I'd been there ten months, I couldn't take it anymore. I started having blackouts."

    "Blackouts?"

    "You know how you get sometimes when you drink too much and can't quite remember the night before?"

    "Uh-huh."

    "Well, that was happening to me. And also these really terrible nightmares."

    "What about?"

    She hesitated. "About killing people."

    "Anybody in particular?"

    "A lot of people. People I loved, that was the strange thing."

    "Your mother and father?"

    "Yes, I'm ashamed to say."

    "And David Foster?"

    "Oh, yes, he was in there, too."

    "So then you decided to leave."

    She nodded. "Yes, my folks thought that I should stay. Quinlan insisted I wasn't 'complete' yet. But I finally pushed hard enough that my parents took me out of there and brought me back home."

    She checked her wristwatch. "My mother is very worried about me these days. I really should call her."

    "I'll be right here."

    "I really appreciate all this, Coffey. I really do."

    While she went off to call her mother, Coffey sat there and went through the conversation he'd had with Hal Ford about multiple personalities. He then thought for some time about Linda Fleming and how Ford thought she'd been "artificially imposed" on Jenny.

    And then he thought about the dead man in the Econo-Nite Motel. Could you brainwash somebody into becoming a killer? The old answer was no.

    Coffey wondered what the new, up-to-date answer was.

    

    

    David Foster appreciated the pains Cummings took
not
to look like a private investigator.

    Start with the office. It looked like a dentist worked here. Very bright reception area. A variety of family-oriented magazines on the coffee table, everything from
Time
to
TV Guide
.
The walls covered with family-style framed paintings-a babbling brook, a Christmas scene, a football Saturday afternoon. The music was the same kind of stuff you heard on the elevators in the very best business centers. And the furnishings-a desk, six chairs, a coffee table and a small couch-had the professional impersonality of successful businesses everywhere.

    Then there was Cummings himself. The carefully trimmed (if thinning) brown hair, the three-piece blue suit, the blue button-down shirt, the blue-yellow-white regimental striped tie, and the black wingtips all bespoke a successful businessman. Not a thug. Not a keyhole peeper. Not a shakedown artist.

    Cummings had just poured them bourbon from an elegant, cut-glass decanter. He was just settling in behind his desk, as Foster was just settling in on the other side of the desk, when the phone rang.

    Cummings picked up and said, "I'm a little busy right now, honey." Beat. "I know what day it is, sweetheart." Beat. "Of course our anniversary means something to me, darling." Beat. "As soon as I can, hon. And I'll pick up a good bottle of wine, too." Beat. "Love you, too. You know I do." He hung up and looked at Foster. "When she met me, I was just a cop. The investigative firm was her idea. We've had a hell of a good run, my wife and I."

    Then, without changing his tone of voice or his position in his chair, he said, "So I'm sorry about getting you over here so late tonight. But I thought you'd better see what I've come up with. I'm still having a hard time believing it myself."

    So Cummings walked him through it. It was complicated and at several points, Foster wanted to stop him and say, "No, this is impossible." But he didn't. He listened. For one thing, Cummings had a very good reputation among Chicago's elite. You wanted a good private investigator, you hired Cummings. He was not only competent (ten years in Army Intelligence, ending his career when the Berlin Wall came down because Intelligence wasn't much fun without the Commies around), but he was also discreet (he served two months in jail for contempt rather than reveal the name of the man who'd hired him for a certain job) and relentless (two years ago, he literally blackmailed a key state senator into changing his vote on a certain issue). So when Cummings talked, people listened. And for a second thing, Foster was paying him a whole hell of a lot of money.

    In all, Cummings spent thirty-five minutes laying it all out for Foster. And when he finished, he sat back in his leather, executive-style chair and said, "You don't believe it, do you?"

    "It's mind-boggling."

    "It sure is."

    "How the hell did you find all this out?"

    "It's what you pay me for, Mr. Foster. To find out."

    "I'm going to need some time to-absorb this. Then I have to figure out what I'm going to do with it."

    "I knew you'd be shocked.
I'd
certainly be shocked."

    "I still have some doubts. I mean, what you were saying is-"

    "I'd have doubts, too, Mr. Foster."

    "Really?"