Ed King (19 page)

A face-lift was complicated. Dr. Berg was board-certified as a dermatologist,
but not as a plastic surgeon. Dr. Green didn’t do faces. They both had recommendations for her, but not the same recommendations. Diane found herself running around a lot, even flying to Los Angeles to consult with a surgeon to the stars. Everyone she interviewed had sound credentials on paper, and in person seemed equally stellar, but in the end she chose a doctor named Jerry Kaplan because he was local, booked into June, and had
Vanity Fair
instead of
Vogue
in his waiting room. His nurse gave Diane testimonials, informational pamphlets, reassurance, and compliments. Diane read the literature as well as some horror stories—suddenly ubiquitous—about face-lifts gone bad, anesthesia disasters, and painful problems with healing. These didn’t dissuade her. Dr. Kaplan, with his passionate ideas about her face and the things that might be done with it, seemed equal to the task. They could start with a brow lift to smooth her forehead, he said, plus eye work to tighten her lower lids—“bang-for-your-buck work,” he called it. He predicted she’d be happy with that package, but couldn’t make promises because his line of work was more art than science.

“Art?” Diane asked. “That makes me a bit nervous.”

Dr. Kaplan tilted back in his desk chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “It’s
aesthetic
surgery,” he said. “Results are therefore
always
subjective. They get viewed through the lens of emotional issues.” The doctor rotated his neck as if to loosen it. “Let me be one-hundred-percent candid,” he said. “No one should opt for aesthetic surgery when in fact what they need is therapy. My work is external. I only change the surface.”

“I don’t need therapy,” said Diane. “I need to look better.”

Dr. Kaplan dislodged something irritating from the corner of his eye. “The way you look, yes, I can do something about,” he assured her, “but inner stuff, that’s not my area. I can’t do away with your emotional problems—I mean, if you
had
emotional problems.” Dr. Kaplan ground what had come from his eyelid between his thumb and forefinger. “Inside, that’s
not my area
,” he repeated. “I’m going to do everything in my power to make your face look absolutely wonderful, but—”

“It isn’t wonderful now?”

Not missing a beat, the doctor assessed her face. “It
is
wonderful,” he said. “Should we cancel your surgery?”

Two weeks later, she sat on the edge of his examination table while he rolled her skin around under his hands and looked at it closely through a
lit magnifier. As he pressed, pulled, lifted, and prodded, he said, “Under the jawline you’ve lost minimal structural support we could probably address with a simple S-lift, or just leave it for later. With the peels you’ve had, your skin quality is still good, but here, below your eyes, as you know, we have a little tiredness showing, which I think we should go after, and … well … your upper eyelids are debatable. I could lift them, I guess, or I could do the whole forehead, I could pull up the forehead, which does have just a little sag to it—not bad, though—and bring the eyelids up with it; I actually think that’s probably preferable in your case.” Dr. Kaplan moved her temples about under practiced fingers. “All right,” he said, still probing and pressing, “S-lift, lower lids, brow lift as opposed to just eyelids, let’s do that while you’ve still got good elasticity. And you do have good elasticity for someone your age. Not that I don’t want to have your business, but all of this could wait a few years, I feel obligated to tell you. It really could.”

“Let’s do it all,” said Diane. “That’s what I want.”

“Tell me again what you want,” said Dr. Kaplan. “Let’s do that one more time.”

“What I want,” said Diane. “I want to look younger. I don’t want to have jowls. I don’t like my eyes. I don’t like my forehead. I don’t want to look droopy and tired all the time. Also, I don’t want to look like I’ve had any surgery. My goal is to look ten years younger, but natural, not fake.”

Knowing how she sounded, Diane added, “I wouldn’t say this sort of thing except to a plastic surgeon. But really there’s another side of me—another me—who’s much less vain.”

On the appointed day, Diane did what Dr. Kaplan’s nurse told her to do—showed up on an empty stomach, with a sedative swallowed, no makeup or jewelry, and Jim in tow. After her face was marked as if by a tattoo artist and she was supine on a gurney in an unbecoming hospital gown, Jim planted a kiss on her forehead and said, “I love you, Diane. I’ll be here when you come out. God bless.”

And Jim
was
there when she awoke in the recovery room, except that she couldn’t see him, blinded as she was by claustrophobic bandages. She only knew he was there because when she said his name—“Jim?”—he answered, “Let’s cut to the chase, Diane. I noticed something funny in your charts.”

This didn’t sound normal. It wasn’t what Jim ought to be saying to
her, first thing, when she came out of surgery. “Are my eyes all right?” she asked, and it hurt her throat to say it. “Did it go all right? Am I in good shape?”

There came what had to be a nurse’s voice: “It went great. Are you thirsty, Mrs. Long? You’re thirsty. I’ll get ice chips. It went fantastic—everything’s good. Doctor will be in to tell you more, but he’s very, very happy about everything.”

Then it was Jim’s voice again, still with that flat, troubling, all-business tone so lacking in post-op sympathy. “I don’t know if everything’s so good,” he told her. “You’re bandaged, so I can’t put your chart in front of your face, but what it says is C-O-C-P, Diane. Which means the pill.”

Despite deep anesthetic grogginess, Diane met this aspersion with a display of calm candor. “I’m not on the pill,” she said.

“Then why is it on your chart?”

“Mistake.”

There was a long pause, during which Diane thought, “Horrid timing.” Blind and helpless, she heard Jim say, “I’m pissed off. I’m really, really pissed. I don’t think I’ve ever been this pissed. This is low. It’s just so down there. I can’t believe this—it’s from someone else’s life. This shouldn’t be happening to me.”

“Jim.”

“Don’t ‘Jim’ me. You know what, Diane? All this money on your looks, it’s super
fi
cial. And then to lie on top of it, about the pill, to say it’s a mistake—who the hell are you? Who are you?”

When Diane didn’t answer, the nurse intervened with, “Maybe you should talk about this later, Mr. Long. Our patient is just out of surgery.”

But the talk that came later was in the same losing vein. Jim brooked nothing and wrathfully put his foot down. The righteous assurance that made the Longs so rich? Jim displayed it in spades now, the full version. In other words, there was nothing to talk about, or nothing
Jim
would talk about. Before Diane could grasp where things were going, her furiously wronged husband had hired an investigator. Within a week of her face-lift, the pill was a fact, and then lying became Jim’s theme—how many lies, of what sort, when. The investigator found plenty that was fodder for Jim, including the post-office box in Sullivan’s Gulch she’d recently closed. Things hit bottom when he tied Diane’s old phone number
to the Candace Dark Escort Service. This investigator was good, but—the saving grace—he didn’t find out about Baby Doe.

The Longs were aghast to find that Jim had married a former “escort.” They closed ranks, as they had against Sue’s wayward trucking magnate, and handed Diane her head on a plate. The deceit about fertility, the strangeness of the post-office box, the lies about her past, the invented life, the phony persona: all of this added up to more than enough grist for the top-notch divorce lawyer Jim retained—the one who’d helped Sue take her cheating magnate to the cleaners—to make sure that Diane was banished from the family with as little diminution of its ski fortune as Oregon law would allow. When all was said and done, she was back on the street after eleven years as Mrs. Long with twenty-five thousand dollars Jim gave her to go away, thirty thousand dollars of Walter Cousins’s hush money, some pretty decent clothes, a slim butt and waist, a worked-on face that looked permanently astonished, and—as always—regrets about her son. Not bad, all things considered. Regrets, clothes, beauty, relative youth, and fifty-five thousand for a fresh start.

Following his victory in the region of wheat, Ed drove scrupulously under the speed limit, with frequent reference to his rearview mirror. “You think he’s dead?” he asked Tracy Stolnitz at intervals. “You think that guy is really dead?”

“Yeah,” answered Tracy, or something like it, each time. “I think we’re in some pretty deep shit.”

Ed worried that a farmer had seen what he’d done and had called the State Patrol already. Near Washtucna, he worried about a roadblock, like in the movies, but, grimly rolling the dice, passed through at the posted speed limit. After that it was an hour to Othello—an hour with persistent rearview-mirror checking, more worry about a farmer making a phone call, worry that the BMW driver might have miraculously survived, worry about everything. But there was still no roadblock when he got to Othello, or at Royal City, Vantage, or Ellensburg. Although that didn’t mean much. Because, if the guy
had
survived, trouble could come later. Maybe he’d convalesce with steely vengeance before tracking Ed down and killing him. Or he’d roll out of surgery, gasp, groan, and tell an investigator about the black ’66 Pontiac GTO, with Washington plates and racing stripes, that had forced him off the road. The very GTO Ed was driving, with its
thick film of farm dirt. The one for which there might be, by now, a “be on the lookout” for everyone in law enforcement from Idaho to the coast and from Oregon to the Canadian border. There was much to worry about, but Ed and Tracy made it back to Seattle without any trouble except, in Ed’s case, inner trouble—remorse, self-examination, and, most of all, fear of being caught.

“Cool,” Tracy said, when he dropped her off at her mother’s house. “I think we’re cool.”

“I can’t believe it,” answered Ed. “I killed a guy.”

The next morning, after a bout with sleeplessness, he washed the dust from his car. He told Alice he couldn’t drive it because it needed work, and asked her if he could move her Peugeot outside so that he could use the garage for repairs. “I also wonder if I could borrow the Peugeot,” he said, “to go get some parts.” “Yours until noon,” she replied, and planted a kiss on his cheek. Ed, with his car hidden, drove straight to the downtown library, where he read, in the
Moscow-Pullman Review
, an article called
SEATTLE MAN KILLED IN SINGLE CAR ACCIDENT
.

Ed copied this article and took it to Tracy’s. They went into her room and shut the door. She read it, shrugged, and handed it back to him. “Deal with it,” she said.

Ed didn’t answer, because he felt chilled by this response, and because he didn’t want to have an argument with a girl who so willingly did everything for him. Their habit that summer had been daytime sex, because her mother wasn’t back from her shift until six, her chip-toothed brother couldn’t have cared less, and her father lived somewhere else. Nothing had mattered at Tracy’s house except for what went on in Tracy’s bedroom. There, Ed had enjoyed himself to the hilt while feeling on top of the world.

On this day, though, he lay clothed on Tracy’s bed, talking about what had happened in eastern Washington. “I killed that guy,” he kept repeating.

“And now you’re freaking out about it,” Tracy kept answering.

That afternoon, doing it with her, Ed couldn’t get in the right mood. How was he supposed to enjoy someone who turned out to be so callous about murder? Who could clutch, moan, grunt, and suck as if nothing had happened? Ed pressed on anyway, but the more avid he became about Tracy’s pallid body and the rhythmic jabbing of her narrow rib cage, the worse he felt.

The next day, it was in the
Spokane Spokesman-Review
under
SPEED CONTRIBUTED TO SINGLE-CAR ACCIDENT
:

He took this to Tracy, too. Again they lay on her bed, talking about what had happened near Pullman—or Ed talked about what had happened near Pullman—while, across the hall, Tracy’s brother punished a drum set. “Why did I do it?” Ed asked.

“Come on.”

“What got into me?”

“Come on, Ed.”

But he didn’t want to have sex. He kept rereading the article. Tracy, exasperated, picked up a paperback with a picture on its cover of a ghoul in a graveyard. “How can you read that?” he asked.

“This?”

“Why would you want that stuff in your head?”

“It’s just a story,” said Tracy.

On Wednesday, Ed didn’t have to go to the library, because Dan and Alice subscribed to the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, which ran Walter
Cousins’s obituary. Ed quickly took in the headline—
HO CHI MINH DIES
—then flipped to the B section and read: