Moonbird Boy (26 page)

"But did it work?" Bo asked. "Did the fetal cells replace some segment of Mort's brain?"

Ann Keith sighed. "Possibly, but probably not. There was no way to tell without further surgery, and the mechanisms of schizophrenia are not as well researched as those of Parkinson's. Until recently there was virtually no research at all. Now we know the limbic system is involved. CAT scans had shown typical abnormalities in Adam's hippocampus and hypothalamus. Those were the sites I chose for cell transplants. This was a desperate act, Bo, not a rational one. On a par with appeals to magic. It was simply the last thing I could do to save my son. The likelihood that these fetal cells would grow and partially supplant malfunctioning cells in Adam's brain was educated speculation at best, pathetic and arguably criminal delusion at worst."

"But Adam got better. He was successful, Ann. He made a great deal of money, functioned, took care of Bird, everything. Maybe the experiment did work. He thought so. He said he paced in a circle when he was off his meds because dogs do that."

Ann Keith shook her head, smiling. "Adam loved the idea that he was part dog after the surgery. Look at the name he gave himself."

"Wagman," Bo pronounced, her eyes wide. "Mort Wagman... Dead Dog!"

"He was very aware of the embryo from which the cells were taken," Keith said. "He created a sort of mythos around it, felt that he was living its life for it in some sense."

The three Jack Russell terriers watched Bo hopefully from the kitchen floor, aware that treats were likely to be provided from kitchens. "You said the other embryos in the litter were not removed by this medical lab," she said slowly.

"The other embryos were born and are at the moment shedding on your kitchen floor," Keith nodded. "I know it's bizarre, but I had to have them. Call me crazy. They're like family."

"You're crazy," Bo agreed. "Totally nuts. And believe me, I don't say that very often. But I still don't understand why Mort got better, if the surgery wasn't responsible."

"Clozapine," Ann Keith answered. "It was finally legalized for use in this country by the Food and Drug Administration several months after our return from Europe. I believe that medication, plus Adam's maturing out of his adolescent hormonal surges, was responsible for his improvement. But the truth is, without the hope the surgery gave him, Adam wouldn't have been alive by the time Clozapine was available."

"Your grandson has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," Bo told the woman sitting at her counter. "How do you feel about that?"

"I don't know quite how to respond. It's not a surprise to me. Remember, Charles and Adam lived with me until Charles was four. I suspected it. Is he receiving the appropriate medication?"

"Not yet," Bo answered. "But are you going to be able to cope with the problems?"

"Charles will attend the same private school his father did. It's very old-fashioned, traditional. All the teachers are men, so he'll have male role models. And I already know an excellent child psychiatrist. But Bo, all this depends on my getting him out of here safely. May I get him now?"

"You'll have to stay in San Diego until the court releases Charles," Bo explained, "but I can file that paperwork this afternoon. What I still don't know is why you think Charles is in danger. Who do you think wants to hurt him?"

"I believe that MedNet is responsible for the death of my son," she said angrily. "Adam's attorney, Reynolds Cassidy, told me that Adam phoned him late the night before he was killed, very upset. Adam directed Cassidy to make arrangements for a substantial loan, make the money available. Now I realize that Adam was going to rescue this Indian psychiatric program from MedNet. I believe that MedNet, probably in the person of Alexander Morley, knew what Adam planned, and ordered his death. I also believe that someone else in MedNet, someone not well placed enough to know that I have no influence there, has reason to oppose the takeover, and is using threats against Charles to compel me to vote against it, even though in reality I have no vote and no influence. Whoever it is is stupid, which makes him doubly dangerous."

What Ann Keith believed about her son's death made sense, Bo thought, if the rest of it did not. Some sense, but not quite enough. There were missing pieces in Keith's view of what happened the night a shot burst the desert sky, too many near-impossible variables falling together at once. It would mean that Zach knew of the MedNet takeover within hours of Hopper Mead's death, told Mort Wagman about it the night of Mildred's Kurok, and that Mort was so alarmed that he phoned his attorney to transfer funds in the middle of the night.

Mort might have done that, Bo conceded, since a call to his attorney's home would skirt the runaround involved in phoning his office the next morning, when Mort and Bird would be en route back to Los Angeles, anyway. Still, Ann Keith was conjecturing from fear, not hard data. Unwise to grant too much credibility to her view of the situation. And there was no point in explaining that Zach and the mob, not MedNet, had threatened her. She wouldn't believe it, so great was her animosity toward the corporation to which she had sold her professional reputation.

"Here are directions to the hospital," Bo said, handing the other woman a map scribbled on the back of an envelope, "and my home phone number. You can pick Bird up now, but you must stay in San Diego until the petition I filed for Bird in juvenile court has been dismissed. You'll be required to provide identification to security at St. Mary's. And I need your address and phone number."

"I have a small suite at a hotel on the bay where pets are welcome," Ann Keith replied, writing the required information on a business card. "And thank you, Bo. I'll phone you this evening to let you know how Charles is doing."

"Ann, why was your son hiding from you?"

"Because there was no other way for him to grow up, find out who he was," the older woman answered from the apartment's open door. "Isn't that the point of being alive?"

Bo watched as Ann Keith and the three Jack Russells left her apartment. Then she phoned Eva Broussard.

"I'm over my head with this case," she told her shrink. "I may just have made a serious mistake, and Andy is buying a house. The story I've just heard rivals Invasion of the Body Snatchers in content, except without the space aliens. Also, I think it's probably true. A little girl has given me a dachshund puppy I wasn't going to keep until she sang 'Molly Malone,' and I knew I had to. She's so cute, Eva, but I'd forgotten about puppies, the housebreaking, everything. Andy wants me to live with him, although he's not being pushy, and I'm afraid this case is going to close without anybody finding who killed Mort. I'm not sure Adirondack chairs are really right for Andy's yard, either."

"I'm afraid you lost me at 'space aliens,' " Eva replied. ”The term always catches my attention. I'm giving a luncheon talk on it today, in fact, to a conference of journalists at a hotel in Mission Valley near your office. Why don't we meet for coffee afterward?"

"The espresso bar at Hazard Center," Bo decided quickly. "Two o'clock?" "Fine."

Bo wadded the soggy newspaper into a trash bag, changed clothes, and scooped Molly from beneath the television where she was shredding an advertising mailer for a Cantonese restaurant.

"Too much MSG," she told the puppy, picking bits of damp card stock out of the carpet. "And you're going to have to go to work with me until I can do something about daycare.

The little dog indicated her acceptance of the plan by licking Bo in the eye.

Eva Broussard was already seated at an umbrellaed table outside the espresso bar when Bo arrived with Molly. In an olive silk jacket over a pencil-thin knit dress the color of new pewter she looked, Bo thought, less like a half-Iroquois psychiatrist than a Parisian businesswoman involved in the fashion industry.

"Ah, the new baby!" Eva exclaimed as Molly sniffed her gray kid pumps with unabashed interest, tail quivering. "She's quite spirited, Bo, like her mistress. But how did you come to get another dog?"

After ordering an iced hazelnut latte, Bo explained her meeting with Lindsey Sandifer and the situation that led Lindsey to select Bo as the puppy's new owner.

"Lindsey said she wanted to live with her mom in a covered wagon on the prairie," she told Eva. "I guess a mobile home outside Phoenix is pretty close."

"The decision required great courage on the part of her mother," Eva mused over her espresso. "I can't help wondering at times exactly what combination of variables it is that we call love."

The word hung uneasily above them as Bo straightened the hem of her knit skirt, then spent the better part of a minute coaxing Molly to drink some water from a paper cup brought by the waiter. "I've been wondering about that, too," she said. "Not sex, but love. It's dangerous, Eva. It's like a sort of unending mania that takes people out of reality and into another dimension."

"Yes," Eva Broussard said. The word fell somewhere between statement and question.

"I met Ann Lee Keith this morning," Bo began, and then told her psychiatrist the story of why a young man named Adam Keith chose to call himself "Dead Dog."

Mon dieu, Eva whispered. "As a child I heard many strange stories, the old Iroquois legends full of peculiar images—a flayed skin that sang in a tree, a flying head, a beautiful, seductive man who was in reality a snake—but this story is true, yes?"

"I think it is."

"Then your work has brought you a gift."

Bo enjoyed a sip of cold latte. "Gift?"

"A story. One you won't forget as the details of the present are lost. Whenever you remember Mildred's death, your terrible sadness, Mort's friendship, the arrival of Molly in your life, Andrew's house—all the events of this difficult time— you'll remember a story of great and frightening love. What Dr. Keith did won't seem strange at all ten years from now; they're already using brain cell transplants from fetal pigs for Parkinson's disease, with astonishing results. But because Keith acted ahead of history and at great sacrifice, the story is unforgettable, a framework for your experience now, and a priceless gift."

"What Ann did for her son ultimately drove him away," Bo sighed, rattling the ice in her glass. "Her caring for him left no room for him. He had to flee, to hide, in order to... to be himself."

"Every child must do that, separate from its parents, sooner or later. Adam's illness made the process more dramatic and difficult. But every love involves that struggle, don't you think? And sometimes it goes badly, becomes diseased and obsessive on one or both sides. Fortunately, it sounds as though Ann Keith stopped far short of the obsession Adam might have become for her after she sacrificed her career. She's a remarkable woman."

"I hope I'm right about her," Bo said, frowning. "I released Bird to her this morning, technically under my supervision until the petition's dismissed. Madge was thrilled, of course. We can close the case now. It's all ending, but there's something that's bothering me, something I can't quite see. Mort was murdered, and then somebody began trying to upset me with those tapes on the phone, following me in the fog, the red collar on the tree. There has to be a connection somewhere, but there isn't. If MedNet orchestrated Mort's death to keep him from bailing out the Neji, why would they try to drive me crazy? I can't help the Indians. It doesn't make any sense."

"It actually happened, therefore it does make sense," Eva said emphatically, leaning to pick up the puppy asleep on her foot. "It's just that the sense isn't apparent at the moment. It may never be apparent. Did you know that about thirty percent of homicides are never solved? In those cases the sense of a sequence of behaviors is simply not discerned by outsiders, but that doesn't mean it's not there."

"I can't live with that," Bo said. The idea was completely unacceptable. "Mort had already suffered the onset of schizophrenia before there were any decent drugs for it, starved, froze in the streets, attempted suicide. But he survived, eventually made a life, cared for his son, even became wealthy. That was so important to him he was willing to go off his meds to make that commercial for SnakeEye. I won't accept that somebody can just kill him in the middle of the night and walk away. That's not right!"

Eva smiled at Molly, curled in her lap. "Americans are culturally intolerant of moral ambiguity," she told the snoozing dog. "It's a national trait, the legacy of Puritanism I'm afraid."

"You're going to get dog hair on your dress," Bo noted peevishly.

Ignoring the remark, Eva knit her brow, thinking. "Why was money so important to him, do you think?"

"I don't know. Maybe he wanted to make sure Bird was well cared for. But I had a sense there was more to it, something about pride, something personal."

"The answers may lie in looking at questions like that, questions that seem very peripheral to the central event of his death. Seemingly inconsequential issues sometimes open doors to whole sets of motivations previously overlooked."

"A psychiatrist would say that," Bo smiled. "And you're the best. Thanks, Eva."

As they stood to leave, Eva Broussard halted, remembering something. "I'm not going to bring up your relationship with Andrew, but I've thought about the Adirondack chairs," she said, her dark eyes warm with amusement, "and after living in the Adirondacks I'm prepared to state that they're impossible to get out of gracefully. As I recall, the experience is like being a turtle trapped on its back. Perhaps that information will help you in making your decision about Andrew's lawn."

"Scratch the Adirondack chairs," Bo nodded. "I was afraid of that."

On the way back to her office Bo thought about Eva's remarks. What inconsequential issue might open the door leading to Mort Wagman's killer? The name, even in thought, seemed a caricature now. And Bo hadn't known a young man named Adam Keith at all.

"So who was my brother," she asked Molly, "Mort or Adam?"

This way lies madness, Bradley. Wouldn't it be easier to concentrate on the sound of one hand clapping?