James Patterson: Private

Twenty-five minutes after getting Donahue’s call, I bulled my way through the lobby of Glendale Memorial and stabbed the elevator button until the doors opened and then closed behind me.

By some kind of blind bloodhound instinct, I found Colleen’s room on the first try.

I strong-armed the swinging door, and Donahue got up from the bedside chair, came toward me, and shook my hand.

“Take it easy on her, Jack. She’s not well.”

“What happened?”

“I’ll leave the two of you alone.”

Colleen’s cheeks were flushed. Her hair was damp at her temples. The white cotton blankets covered her to her chin.

She looked very small in the bed, like a feverish child.

I took Mike’s vacated chair, leaned over, and touched her shoulder. I was scared for her. She’d never been sick since I’d met her. Not a day.

“Colleen. It’s Jack.”

She opened her blue eyes and nodded when she saw me.

“Are you okay? What happened?” I asked.

Medication dragged at her voice. “I’m going home.”

“What are you saying? To Dublin?”

A terrible thought came to me-like a balled fist to the gut. “Were you pregnant? Did you lose the baby?”

Colleen’s blank expression became a smile. She laughed and then she was swept up in a kind of hysteria that turned to sobs. She put her hands up by her cheeks, and I saw shocking white bands of gauze and tape binding her wrists.

The gauze was striped with bright blood, which was seeping through.

What had she done?

“I told Mike not to call you. I’m mortified for you to see me like this… I’ll be all right. Please go, Jack. I’m fine now.”

“What were you thinking, Colleen?”

I thought back over the past weeks and months. I hadn’t noticed that Colleen was depressed. How had I missed it? What the hell was wrong with me sometimes?

“I was completely daft,” she said. “I just hurt so much. You don’t have to tell me again. I know it’s over.”

“Colleen. Oh, Colleen,” I whispered.

She closed her eyes, and shame washed over me. Guilt and shame. I did care about Colleen, but she cared more. It had been selfish of me to stay with her for so long, when I knew we’d gone as far as we could go. I’d hurt this woman-and she’d done this to herself. What a terrible thing.

I don’t know how long the silence between us lasted. Maybe it was only a minute, but it was time enough to think about what Colleen meant to me and to try to imagine a future for the two of us. It was sad, but I just couldn’t see it.

“At least you won’t be having to listen to my queer way of talkin’,” she said.

“Don’t you know that I love to listen to your voice?”

“You were good to me, Jack. Always. I won’t forget that.”

“Damn it, Molloy. I want you to be happy.”

She nodded, tears slipping down her cheeks.

“You too,” she said. “I want that for you too.”

Neither of us said another word.

I kissed her good-bye, then I walked out, and I knew I would never see Colleen again, and that was my loss.

I had let another good woman get away, hadn’t I? What the hell was wrong with me?

I had planned a “wrap party” at the Pacific Dining Car to thank the guys in the lab as well as the primaries on the Schoolgirl case for a job extremely well done.

After seeing Colleen, I couldn’t celebrate and I couldn’t fake it.

I phoned Sci, told him I had a family emergency, and asked him to stand in for me as host. Then I did the unthinkable. I turned off my phone.

I drove to Forest Lawn, an old and sprawling cemetery where dozens of celebrities were buried. My sweet mom was buried there too.

She’d been taken down by a previously undiagnosed heart disease during the heat and ugliness of my father’s trial. It was a sharp, unexpected ending to an unfulfilled life. Maybe it was my mother and father’s bad relationship that kept me away from marriage.

I took off my jacket and sat on the grass near her simple stone, engraved with hands folded in prayer above an inscription: “Sandra Kreutzer Morgan is with God.”

A lawn mower hummed in the distance, and I saw the flash of Mylar balloons, probably hovering over the grave of some poor child buried nearby.

I didn’t talk to my mother’s bones or her spirit. I didn’t even pray until just before I left.

But I thought about the good times we’d had together: the rare picnics, a few tailgate parties after football games, watching Peter Sellers movies with her on late-night TV. She had probably seen The Pink Panther a hundred times. So had I. So had Tommy.

I grinned thinking about that, and after a while I rolled my jacket into a pillow and lay down. I got mesmerized by the slow shifting of the oak leaves in the branches overhead.

And then I fell off the planet for a while.

I must have slept long and deep, because I was awakened by a groundskeeper shaking my arm, saying, “Sir, we’re closing. You have to leave, sir.”

I touched Mom’s stone, found my car, and as the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh, my car seemed to drive itself to a pretty carriage house I knew well in the flats of Beverly Hills.

I parked on Wetherly, a tidy residential block, and sat for a while just looking at Justine’s small, beautiful house. I turned my phone back on and tapped in her number.

Justine answered on the first ring. “Jack. What was this family emergency?” she asked. “You missed the party.”

“Colleen is going back to Dublin,” I said. “We talked it over. After that I went out to Forest Lawn. I needed time to think.”

“Are you okay?”

“Sure.”

“ ‘Sure,’ he says,” Justine said, tweaking me. “Well, I’ve had to do some mental reorganization of my own. See, um, Bobby dumped me to go back to his wife. Too bad for Bobby, though; she didn’t want him anymore.”

I wanted to comfort Justine, and at the same time I was happy to hear this breaking news. Justine was too good for Bobby Petino, or to get tainted by the smudge and stink of California politics.

I wondered where Justine was right now. I pictured her in a chaise in her study, or lying in bed with the TV turned down, a glass of wine in her hand. My emotional pull toward her was almost a physical force.

“What are you doing right now?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I could come over,” I said. “Just for a while.”

There was a deep pause that I filled with hope.

“Jack, we both know that would be a bad idea,” Justine said. “Why don’t you just get a good night’s sleep, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I was saying her name when she disconnected the line. I watched the lights go off in her house, one by one.

And then I drove to my home alone.

Out-of-work actor Parker Dalton knocked on the door of Suite 34 at the Chateau Marmont.

He held the folding massage table by its handle, reset his cap with his other hand, and waited on the dark print carpet for Mr. Cushman to invite him in for his daily rub.

Dalton loved this job, actually. Stars had always stayed at the Chateau, and some of them actually lived here several months at a time. The sightings of Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Matthew Perry, and others made fantastic entries on Dalton’s blog and always gave him hope for his own career.

Mr. Cushman was no star, but he was a celebrity, what with his wife having been murdered and the killer still on the loose.

Dalton had tweeted about his sessions with Mr. Cushman, and his friends and innumerable friends of friends begged for more tweets, more details, more snarky observations.