Smoked Out (Digger) (19 page)

"Mister Burroughs…"

Digger looked up and saw the bartender. He nodded.

"Phone call for you."

"Thank you." Digger walked over to the table to take the call. It was midnight on his watch. How time flew when one was having fun. Breslin was on the telephone. Digger motioned to the bartender for another drink.

"I thought I’d find you there," Breslin said.

"If you looked anyplace else first, turn in your Dick Tracy wristwatch. Your friend go home?"

"No, she’s sleeping. Finally. Christ, I never saw a woman with a capacity to absorb tongue-washing like that one."

"She’s lucky she found you. You have a great capacity for suffering," Digger said.

"Listen," Breslin said. "I don’t want to be on this phone too long. Jenna is liable to wake up and then I’ll have to go through that again."

"So tell me what I want to know and I’ll let you go."

"All right. Jenna really did her homework."

"I’ll bet she did. Throw her one for me."

"I already did. Shut up and listen," Breslin said. "Moira Walker. Her husband’s name
was
Harry. He was a doctor. He and Welles practiced together. Actually, the way it worked was that Walker was the real doctor. Welles was kind of a front man. You know, the hand-shaker, people-meeter, get them to the office and let Dr. Walker treat them. According to Jenna, Welles never really practiced anything but bullshit. But he used to go on the tube, talk shows and shit, and yack it up. They called him the doctor to the stars, but he was the shill to the stars and Walker was the real doctor."

"Sounds like a horseshit deal for Walker," Digger said.

"Maybe, but Welles got them the richest patients in the world. Maybe Walker had bad teeth or couldn’t smile or something. Maybe he’d be running a medical assembly line, fifteen dollars a visit, if it wasn’t for Welles. I don’t know, don’t interrupt, you’re making me lose my train of thought."

"I’m sorry. Please continue, Lt. Breslin, sir."

"Up your ass. Where was I?"

"Losing your train of thought," Digger said.

"Oh, yeah. Anyway, after Walker died, Welles folded the practice. He was working at the hospital then, anyway."

"Why? Why’d he fold the practice?"

"I don’t know. Maybe everybody knew he was a bullshit doctor and wouldn’t go to him."

"Yeah, maybe. When’d Walker die?"

"About eight months ago or so. He and the old lady were driving down from Frisco on the coastal highway and they went off the road. He got killed and she got cut up bad."

"I know. I’ve seen her," Digger said. "Is that it?"

"One more thing. About a year ago, Welles and Walker got involved in a big housing development up near Pismo Beach."

"Come on," Digger said.

"Come on what?"

"Pismo Beach? I thought that was a name from a W.C. Fields movie."

"Think what you want, there really is a Pismo Beach."

"Screenplay by A. Piss Clamm," Digger said.

"Shut up. It was some kind of big housing thing, El Cielito Lindo Grande Estates or some such bullshit—Jenna told me but I forget—and there was a press conference and they were announced as the sponsors."

"And?"

"And right around the time Walker got killed, the whole project went belly up. Something to do with water rights or some such shit, and nothing ever got built."

"You think it was a hustle?" Digger asked.

"I asked Jenna that and she said she talked to their courthouse guy. He said it was a hustle, but the doctors were the ones who got hustled. They put up their money and lost it. And that, my friend, about concludes my report for the evening."

"Put in for an hour’s overtime."

"Thanks—oh shit, she’s awake."

"Two hours overtime," Digger said.

He hung up, went back to his room and took out all his recording tapes, the original interviews and the nightly summaries he had made of them. He made sure he had two full packs of cigarettes and then sat down to play them all through.

Chapter Twenty

Digger’s Log:

Tape recording Number five, 3:00 A.M., Saturday, Julian Burroughs in the matter of Jessalyn Welles.

Well, it’s all in the tapes. Everything’s there, and I feel like an idiot who’s just been handed a copy of
Moby Dick
. Everything’s in there, but I just can’t read it.

I know some things.

I know Jessalyn Welles was sick. The tennis player and Alyne Gurney and Mary Beckwith and Lorelei Kirkland all say so. And I think she had epilepsy. At least there were pills for epilepsy in the house.

I know Welles is a gambler who can’t pay his debts, who cheats at cards and may have needed money in a hurry because he sold his boat in a hurry.

And I know I should have run over that old bastard who saw me today leaving Welles’s house.

There’s a lot more I don’t know.

Disco lights in Welles’s bedroom. A little white fence that Welles built and then tore down after I asked him about it.

I think I got the bastard on a fraudulent application. Maybe. But there’s more. I don’t know why or how, but I sense it deep inside my Semitic-Celtic soul.

I can’t be wrong. I’m already a drunk and a looney. Now a failure? I don’t know if I can deal with being a failure. I can’t stand the thought of giving Kwash the satisfaction.

What do I do if Welles hauls my ass into court? Or, even worse, presses charges against me.

That’s just what I need. Maybe I’ll run. Paint my nose silver and change my name to Tycho Brahe. Sell insurance for Prudential. No one will ever know it’s me.

This has been an awful day. I don’t understand that note from Moira Walker to Welles. If you want to read it that way, you could call it a death threat. It’s good to know, anyway, that Welles is probably a horseshit doctor. He spends too much time in the sun. Nobody reads the
Harvard Medical Review
at poolside. And I still don’t like his eyes.

I wish Koko were here. She has a way of putting things together that is beyond me. I guess that’s because she’s smarter than me. Actually, she’s smarter than everybody.

Expenses today. Twenty-dollar tip to bellhop, twenty-dollar bar bill. I’m tapering off.

Room by credit card.

I’d better come up with something tomorrow or else, I have this sneaking suspicion, my ass is grass.

Chapter Twenty-one

Dr. Martin Kertzner obviously had been warned about Digger. When Digger entered the office and sat down, Kertzner moved away the jar of tongue depressors as if they were too sharp to be left within the insurance man’s reach.

"Don’t believe everything you’ve been told about me," Digger said.

"If I did, I’d have a gun in my lap," Kertzner said. He was a slightly overweight man of about fifty, but there was no sense of pudginess about him. Digger got the impression of an athlete who had recently stopped training and started overeating and was just beginning to marble. His voice was metallically precise and his eyes did not smile. He offered up no pleasantries, not even a "What can I do for you?" Digger decided to deal with his attitude directly.

"Dr. Kertzner, you know that I work for the BSLI Insurance Company?"

"I’ve been told."

"And I know that you do a lot of work for Landfill at our L.A. office."

Kertzner nodded.

"He doesn’t like me," Digger said. Kertzner nodded again. "On the other hand, I don’t like him either."

Kertzner nodded again, as if both these positions were eminently reasonable.

"So what you have," Digger said, "is Landfill on one side and me on the other. He runs the L.A. office. I, on the other hand, am the personal representative of Frank Stevens, the overall grand panjandrum and president of BSLI. Now, what you have to decide, Doctor, is who do you want to impress? Landfill or Mr. Stevens? You will impress Mr. Stevens greatly by cooperating with me."

Kertzner sat silently for a moment; then a large smile creased his tanned face. "I love it when people appeal to my sense of logic," he said. "
And
my sense of survival. Can I make you breakfast? Take you home to meet my family? Need a tonsillectomy?"

"No. Just some answers."

"For Mr. Stevens, and you, anything. Who cares about Tom Langfill, anyway?"

"Good. I want to read you several statements, Doctor, regarding one person’s behavior."

"Go ahead."

Digger read from some written notes. There was Lorelei. "Sometimes I’d find her with her head on the desk, like she was asleep." And Ted Dole. When she was playing tennis, "sometimes the ball would bounce up and hit her in the face. She’d stand there like a statue." Mary Beckwith. "She had fainting spells and took medication. More like spasms, they was."

Digger looked up. "What I need to know is this. Are those statements, those descriptions, consistent with somebody suffering from epilepsy?"

"It’s difficult to diagnose in the third person removed," Kertzner said.

"Unfortunately, we’re talking about a singular person removed. She’s dead and no longer available for examination."

"Oh."

"I’m just asking for a ballpark reaction. Does it sound like it could be epilepsy?"

"Yes. Those statements are consistent with epilepsy. They seem indicative of a routine kind of petit mal seizure and/or a psychomotor attack."

"Thank you. Would trimethadione be a normal prescription for someone suffering from this type of epilepsy?"

"These types. Yes."

"Would aspirins be of value?"

"None at all."

"Would it be possible for someone, say a forty-year-old woman, to develop epilepsy at that age?"

"You mean for the first time?"

"Yes."

"Not unless there had been some kind of brain damage caused by fever or infection or injury. That can bring on psychomotor attacks in adults for the first time. But what you’ve described sounds much like petit mal seizures, and that’s primarily a function of childhood. Generally, epilepsy strikes first between the ages of four and eight, sometimes as late as the teens. Almost all of the cases of epilepsy developing in adulthood are really cases involving people who, as children, had epilepsy that went unnoticed."

"But it’s not impossible for the illness to start later in adult life?"

"Impossible? In medicine, not much is. But unlikely."

"What exactly is epilepsy, Doctor?"

"It’s a thunderstorm."

"I beg your pardon."

"It’s an electrical disturbance in the brain. Kind of an uncontrolled electrical storm. There’s very little evidence that there is any organic basis for it. The EEG—the electroencephalogram—shows distinctive features in the epileptic, but no one really knows the reason why."

"Can seizures get worse?"

"What we’re talking about, Mr. Burroughs, are two basic types of seizures. There’s petit mal, the ‘little sickness.’ These last just a few seconds. A brief blackout, some meaningless movement of the head or eyes or extremities. Call it a dizzy spell. Many people who have them do. Grand mal, the ‘big sickness,’ is the dramatic attack most people think of when they think of epilepsy. The patient may first see spots or flashing lights in front of their eyes, or experience some kind of muscular jerk or movement, and then collapse, lose consciousness and develop convulsive seizures. The person will fall to the ground, possibly even foam at the mouth."

"I see," Digger said. "Does a person with petit mal seizures graduate to grand mal seizures?"

"Not usually. It isn’t a gradation. A person can suffer from one kind or the other kind or both kinds."

"Is there a kind of social censor at work? For instance, could a pilot of a plane—knowing that an attack could mean his death—could he be more or less invulnerable to an attack?"

"No. It can happen at any time. You should understand, Mr. Burroughs, that we’re talking about epileptics who are not under treatment. In most cases, the illness is rather easy to treat and seizures easy to prevent."

"If a person had been on medication, then went off, could the attacks get more frequent and more serious?"

"Yes."

"Is there any way to trigger an epileptic attack in another?"

"No one is quite sure what specific set of circumstances triggers an attack. For instance, watching too much television may cause an attack. So may reading. It could be that the steady rhythmic flickering of a television set…maybe somehow that rhythm sets off an attack."

"I see."

"And then of course there’s the disco syndrome."

"What?" Digger felt his heart skip. He had been listening but not listening. Steady rhythmic movements, flickering of television sets, it was registering on his tape more than in his head. But disco syndrome?

"The disco syndrome," Dr. Kertzner said. "With the growth of discothèques, there was a sudden perceived increase in the number of epileptic attacks. The research indicated—"

"The lights."

The doctor looked annoyed at Digger’s interruption. "Yes. The periodic flashing of the lights seems to be one of the things that triggers an attack."

"Dr. Kertzner, you’re a genius."

"No. Just an epileptic."

"An epileptic and a genius."

"Are you recommending to Mr. Stevens that they increase my examination fees?"

"Yes. And that they send you a Mercedes-Benz for your birthday."

"I already have a Merse. Try for a Rolls. And tell Mr. Stevens that I love him."

"Frank, this is Digger."

"My head hurts." Stevens’s voice was thin and whiny, the sound of a man consumed with self-pity.

"Don’t complain to me. If you’re going to dance, you have to pay the piper."

"Did you call to share with me the cliché of the day?"

"No, Frank. I just called to tell you that I think we’ve got something."

"Good. Can I go back to bed?"

"Not yet. I think we’re off the hook because Mrs. Welles’s application was fraudulent. But I’ve got a hunch."

"Oh, God. It’s not another burglary, is it?"

"No. It’s all on the up."

"If it were that simple, Digger, you wouldn’t have called."

"What I’d like, Frank, is…who’s handling that meeting today with Welles’s attorney?"