The Key to Midnight (7 page)

She smiled thinly. It was her first smile since they had sat down, and it looked unnatural. “Shouldn’t a private detective be pushy at a time like this, inquisitive, absolutely relentless?”

Although her question was meant to sound casual, flippant, Alex saw that she was genuinely afraid of him probing too far. “I’m not a private detective here. I’m not investigating you. I’m just a friend who’s offering a shoulder if you feel like crying on one.” As he spoke, a pang of guilt pierced him, because he actually
was
investigating her.

“Can we get a taxi?” she asked. “I’m not up to any more sightseeing.”

“Sure.”

She clung to his arm as they crossed the palace garden toward the
Kara-mon,
the ornate inner gate.

Overhead, a pair of crows wheeled against the somber sky, cawing as they dived and soared. With a dry flutter of wings, they settled into the exquisitely sculptured branches of a large bonsai pine.

Wanting to pursue the conversation but resigned to Joanna’s silence, Alex was surprised when she suddenly began to talk about the nightmare again. Evidently, on some level and in spite of what she’d said, she
wanted
him to be an aggressive inquisitor, so she would have an excuse to tell him more.

“For a long time,” she continued as they walked, “I’ve thought it’s a symbolic dream, totally Freudian. I figured the mechanical hand and hypodermic syringe weren’t what they seemed. You know? That they represented other things. I thought maybe the nightmare was symbolic of some real-life trauma that I couldn’t face up to even when I was asleep. But...” She faltered. Her voice grew shaky on the last few words and then faded altogether.

“Go on,” he said softly. “A few minutes ago in the palace, when I saw that man with one hand... what scared me so much was... for the first time I realized the dream isn’t symbolic at all. It’s a memory. A memory that comes to me in sleep. It really happened.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

They passed the
Kara-mon.
No other tourists were in sight. Alex stopped Joanna in the space between the inner and outer gates of the castle. Even the nippy autumn breeze hadn’t restored significant color to her cheeks. She was as white-faced as any powdered geisha.

“So somewhere in your past... there actually
was
a man with a mechanical hand?”

She nodded.

“And for reasons you don’t understand, he used a hypodermic needle on you?”

“Yeah. And when I saw the Korean, something... snapped in me. I remembered the voice of the man in the dream. He just kept saying, ‘Once more the needle, once more the needle,’ over and over again.”

“But you don’t know who he was?”

“Or where or when or why. But I swear to God it happened. I’m not crazy. Something happened to me... was done to me... something I can’t remember.”

“Something you don’t
want
to remember. That’s what you said before.”

She spoke in a whisper, as if afraid that the beast in her nightmare might hear her. “That man hurt me ... did something to me that was... a sort of death. Worse than death.”

Each whispered sibilant in her voice was like the hissing of an electrical current leaping in a bright blue arc across the tiny gap between two wires. Alex shivered.

Instinctively he opened his arms. She moved against him, and he held her.

A gust of wind passed through the trees with a sound like scarecrows on the march.

“I know it sounds... so bizarre,” she said miserably. “A man with a mechanical hand, like a villain out of a comic book. But I swear, Alex—”

“I believe you.”

Still in his embrace, she looked up. “You do?”

He watched her closely as he said, “Yes, I really do—Lisa.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Lisa Chelgrin.”

Puzzled, she slipped out of his arms, stepped back from him.

He waited, watched.

“Who’s Lisa Chelgrin?” she asked.

He studied her.

“Alex?”

“I think maybe you honestly don’t know.”

“I don’t.”

“
You
are Lisa Chelgrin,” he said.

He was intent upon catching any fleeting expression that might betray her, a brief glimpse of hidden knowledge, the look of the hunted in her eyes, or perhaps guilt expressed in briefly visible lines of tension at the corners of her mouth. She seemed genuinely perplexed. If Joanna Rand and the long-lost Lisa Chelgrin were one and the same—and Alex was certain now that she could be no one else—then all memory of her true identity had been scrubbed from her either by accident or by intent.

“Lisa Chelgrin?” She seemed dazed. “I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I.”

“Who is she? What’s the joke?”

“No joke. But it’s a long story. Too long for me to tell it while we’re standing here in the cold.”

During the return trip to the Moonglow Lounge, Joanna huddled in one corner of the rear seat of the taxi while Alex told her who he thought she was. Her face remained blank. Her dark-blue eyes were guarded, and she would not look at him directly. He was unable to determine how his words were affecting her.

The driver didn’t speak English. He hummed along softly with the music on a Sony Discman.

“Thomas Moore Chelgrin,” Alex told Joanna. “Ring a bell?”

“No.”

“Never heard of him?”

She shook her head.

“He’s been a United States Senator from Illinois for almost fourteen years. Before that, he served two terms in the House of Representatives—a liberal on social issues, to the right on defense and foreign policy. He’s well liked in Washington, primarily because he’s a team player. And he throws some of the best shindigs in the capital, which makes him popular too. They’re a bunch of partying fools in Washington. They appreciate a man who knows how to set a table and pour whiskey. Apparently Tom Chelgrin satisfies his constituents too, because they keep returning him to office with ever larger vote totals. I’ve never seen a more clever politician, and I hope I never do. He knows how to manipulate the voters—white, brown, black, Catholics and Protestants and Jews and atheists, young and old, right and left. Out of six times at bat, he’s lost only one election, and that was his first. He’s an imposing man—tall, lean, with the trained voice of an actor. His hair turned silver when he was in his early thirties, and his opponents attribute his success to the fact that he
looks
like a senator. That’s damned cynical, and it’s a simplification, but there’s some truth in it.”

When Alex paused, waiting for her reaction, she only said, “Go on.”

“Can you place him yet?”

“I never met him.”

“I think you know him as well as anyone.”

“Not me.”

The cabdriver tried to speed through a changing traffic signal, decided not to risk it after all, and tramped on the brakes. When the car stopped rocking, he glanced at Alex in the rearview mirror, grinned disarmingly, and apologized: “
Gomen-nasai, jokyaku-san.
”

Alex inclined his head respectfully and said,
“Yoroshii desu. Karedomo
...
untenshu-san yukkuri. ”

The driver nodded vigorously in agreement.
“Hai.”
Henceforth he would go slowly, as requested.

Alex turned to Joanna. “When Tom Chelgrin was thirteen, his father died. The family already had been on the edge of poverty, and now they plunged all the way in. Tom worked through high school and college, earned a degree in business. In his early twenties, he was drafted into the army, wound up in Vietnam. While on a search-and-destroy mission, he was taken prisoner by the Viet Cong. Do you know anything about what happened to our POWs during that war?”

“Not much. Not really.”

“During World Wars One and Two, nearly all our POWs had been stubborn in captivity, difficult to contain. They conspired against their keepers, resisted, engineered elaborate escapes. Starting with the Korean War, all that changed. With brutal physical torture and sophisticated brainwashing, by applying continuous psychological stress, the Communists broke their spirit. Not many attempted to escape, and those who actually got away can just about be counted on my fingers. It was the same in Vietnam. If anything, the torture our POWs were subjected to was worse than in Korea. But Chelgrin was one of the few who refused to be passive, cooperative. After fourteen months in captivity, he escaped, made it back to friendly territory.
Time
devoted a cover story to him, and he wrote a successful book about his adventures. He ran for office a few years later, and he milked his service record for every vote it was worth.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Joanna insisted.

As the taxi moved through the heavy traffic on Horikawa Street, Alex said, “When Tom Chelgrin got out of the army, he met a girl, got married, and fathered a child. His mother had died while he was in that North Vietnamese prison camp, and he’d inherited seventy-five or eighty thousand dollars after taxes, which was a good chunk in those pre-inflation days. He put that money with his book earnings and whatever he could borrow, and he purchased a Honda dealership. Soon it seemed like half the people in the country were driving Japanese cars, especially Hondas. Tom added three more dealerships, got into other businesses, and became a rich man. He did a lot of charity work, earned a reputation as a humanitarian in his community, and finally campaigned for a congressional seat. He lost the first time, but came back two years later and won. Won again. And then moved on to the U.S. Senate, where he’s been since—”

Joanna interrupted him. “What about the name you used, what you called me?”

“Lisa Chelgrin.”

“How’s she fit in?”

“She was Thomas Chelgrin’s only child.”

Joanna’s eyes widened. Again, Alex was unable to detect any deception in her response. With genuine surprise, she said, “You think I’m this man’s
daughter?
”

“I believe there’s a chance you might be.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Am I?”

“I’m beginning to wonder,” she said.

“Considering the—”

“I know whose daughter I am, for God’s sake.”

“Do you?”

“Of course. Robert and Elizabeth Rand were my parents.”

“And they died in an accident near Brighton,” he said.

“Yes. A long time ago.”

“And you’ve no living relatives.”

“So?”

“Convenient, don’t you think?”

“Why would I lie to you?” she asked, not just baffled by his peculiar conviction that she was living under a false identity but increasingly angered by it. “I’m not a liar.”

The driver clearly sensed the antagonism in her voice. He glanced at them in the rearview mirror, and then he looked straight ahead, humming a bit louder than the music on the Sony Discman, too polite to eavesdrop even when he didn’t understand the language that they were speaking.

“I’m not calling you a liar,” Alex said quietly.

“That’s sure what I’m hearing.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“The hell I am. This is weird.”

“I agree. It is weird. Your repeating nightmare, your reaction to the Korean with one hand, your resemblance to Lisa Chelgrin. It’s definitely weird.”

She didn’t reply, just glared at him.

“Maybe you’re afraid of what I’m leading up to.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said curtly.

“Then what
are
you afraid of?”

“What are you accusing me of?”

“Joanna, I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m only—”

“I feel like you
are
accusing me, and I don’t like it. I don’t understand it, and I don’t like it. All right?”

She looked away from him and out the side window at the cars and cyclists on Shijo Street.

For a moment Alex was silent, but then he continued as if her outburst had never occurred. “One night in July, more than twelve years ago, the summer after Lisa Chelgrin’s junior year at Georgetown University, she vanished from her father’s vacation villa in Jamaica. Someone got into her bedroom through an unlocked window. Although there were signs of a struggle, even a few smears of her blood on the bedclothes and one windowsill, no one in the house heard her scream. Clearly, she’d been kidnapped, but no ransom demand was received. The police believed she’d been abducted and murdered. A sex maniac, they said. On the other hand, they weren’t able to find her body, so they couldn’t just assume she was dead. At least not right away, not until they went through the motions of an exhaustive search. After three weeks, Chelgrin lost all confidence in the island police—which he should have done the second day he had to deal with them. Because he was from the Chicago area, because a friend of his had used my company and recommended me, Chelgrin asked me to fly to Jamaica to look for Lisa—even though Bonner-Hunter was still a relatively small company back then and I was just turning thirty. My people worked on the case for ten months before Tom Chelgrin gave up. We used eight damned good men full time and hired as many Jamaicans to do a lot of footwork. It was an expensive deal for the senator, but he didn’t care. Still... it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d had ten thousand men on the case. It was a perfect crime. It’s one of only two major investigations that we’ve failed to wrap up successfully since I took over the business.”

The taxi swung around another comer. The Moonglow Lounge stood half a block ahead.

Joanna finally spoke again, although she still wouldn’t look at him. “But why do you think I’m Lisa Chelgrin?”

“Lots of reasons. For one thing, you’re the same age she’d be if she were still alive. More important, you’re a dead ringer for her, just twelve years older.”

Frowning, she looked at him at last. “Do you have a photograph of her?”