Jonathan Kellerman - Silent Partner

“Something like that. Wasn’t his death disputed?”

“By who? The guy who wrote that hoax book? He killed himself after they exposed it, which is a pretty good indication he had something to be ashamed of. Even the conspiracy freaks didn’t believe that one. Anyway, whoever owns it, the corporation lives on- clerk told me it’s one of the biggest landowners west of the Mississippi, thousands of parcels. Ransom’s house happened to be one of them. With that kind of landlord, you can see why there’d be a quick sale.”

He finished his beer, got up to get a third.

“How’s your liver?” I asked.

“Peachy. Mom .” He made a point of guzzling. “Okay, so where were we? Magna, Medi-Cal files on the sister. All right, I guess it might be worth a try in terms of finding her, though I don’t know what the hell finding her’s going to tell us. How disabled was she?”

“Very.”

“Could she talk?”

“No.”

“Terrific.” He wiped foam from his lips. “I want to interview vegetables, I’ll go to a salad bar. What I am going to do is drive up Jalmia and talk to the neighbors. Maybe one of them phoned in the call, knows something about her.”

“About her and Trapp?”

“That would be nice.”

He went into the living room, turned on the TV, put his feet up, and watched the evening news. Within moments he was asleep. And I was remembering a black-and-white snapshot and thinking, despite what he’d said, about Shirlee Ransom. I went into the library and called Olivia Brickerman.

“Hello, darling,” she said, “I just got in and started tending to Prince Albert.”

“If I’m catching you in the middle of something-”

“What? Prunes and oat bran is something ? Just hold on one second and I’ll be with you.”

When she came back on the line, she said, “There, he’s taken care of for the evening.”

“How’s Al doing?”

“Still the life of the party.”

Her husband, a grandmaster and former chess editor for the Times , was a white-haired, white-bearded man who looked like an Old Testament prophet and had been known to go for days at a time without talking.

“I keep him around for torrid sex,” she said. “So, how are you , handsome?”

“Just fine, Olivia. How about yourself? Still enjoying the private sector?”

“Actually, right now I’m feeling pretty abandoned by the private sector. You remember how I got into this hotshot group, don’t you? My sister’s boy, Steve, the psychiatrist, wanted to rescue me from civil service hell and set me up as benefits coordinator? It was fine for a while, nothing too stimulating, but the pay was good, no winos vomiting all over my desk, and I could walk to the beach during lunch. Then, all of a sudden, Stevie takes a position at some drug-abuse hospital out in Utah . He got hooked on skiing; now it’s a religion with him. ‘Gotta go with the snow, Aunt Livvy.’ That’s an M.D. talking. Yale. The guy who replaced him is a real yutz, very cold, thinks social workers are a notch below secretaries. We’re already having friction. So if you hear I’ve retired permanently, don’t be surprised. Enough about me. How’ve you been?”

“Fine.”

“How’s Robin?”

“Terrific,” I said. “Keeping busy.”

“I’m waiting for an invitation, Alex.”

“One of these days.”

“One of these days, eh? Just make sure you tie the knot while I’m still functioning and can enjoy it. Want to hear a terrible joke? What’s the good thing about Alzheimer’s disease?”

“What?”

“You get to meet new people every day. Isn’t that terrible ? The yutz told it to me. You think there was an underlying message?”

“Probably.”

“That’s what I think. The S.O.B.”

“Olivia, I need a favor.”

“And here I thought you were after my body.”

I thought of Olivia’s body, which resembled Alfred Hitchcock’s, and couldn’t help but smile.

“That too,” I said.

“Big talk! What do you need, handsome?”

“Do you still have access to the Medi-Cal files?”

“You kidding? We’ve got Medi-Cal, Medicare, Short-Doyle, Workmen’s Comp, CCS, AFDC, FDI, ATD- every file you can imagine, alphabet soup. These guys are serious billers, Alex. They know how to squeeze all the juice out of a claim. The yutz went back to school after his residency, and got an M.B.A.”

“I’m trying to locate a former patient. She was disabled, needed chronic care, and was hospitalized at a small rehab place in Glendale- on South Brand. The place is no longer there and I can’t remember the name. Ring any bells?”

“Brand Boulevard? No. Lots of places don’t exist anymore. Everything’s going corporate- these smart boys just sold out to some conglomerate from Minneapolis. If she’s totally disabled, that would be ATD. If it’s partial and she worked, she could be on FDI.”

“ATD,” I said. “Could she be on Medi-Cal too?”

“Sure. What’s the name of this person?”

“Shirlee Ransom, with two e’s. Thirty-four years old, with a birthday in May. May 15, 1953.”

“Diagnosis?”

“She had multiple problems. The main diagnoses were probably neurological.”

“Probably? I thought she was your patient.”

I hesitated. “It’s complicated, Olivia.”

“I see. You’re not getting yourself in trouble again, are you?”

“Nothing like that, Olivia. It’s just that there are some confidentiality issues here. I’m sorry I can’t get into it and if it’s too much of a hassle-”

“Stop being such a Goody Two-shoes. It’s not like you’re asking me to commit a crime.” Pause. “Right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, in terms of getting hold of the data, our on-line access is limited to patients treated in California. If your Ms. Ransom is still being treated somewhere in the state, I should be able to get you the information immediately. If she moved out of state I’d have to tap into the master file in Minnesota, and that would take time, maybe even a week. Either way, if she’s getting government money, I’ll get you an address.”

“That simple?”

“Sure, everything’s on computer. We’re all on someone’s list. Some yutz with a giant mainframe has a record of what you and I ate for breakfast this morning, darling.”

“Privacy, the last luxury,” I said.

“You’d better believe it,” she said. “Package it; market it; make a billion.”

Friday morning I booked a Saturday flight to San Luis on Sky West. At 9:00 A.M. Larry Daschoff called and told me he’d located a copy of the porn loop.

“I was wrong. Kruse made it- must have been some kind of personal kick. If you still want to see it, I’ve got an hour and a half between patients,” he said. “Noon to one-thirty. Meet me at this place and we’ll watch a matinee.”

He recited a Beverly Hills address. Turning-over-the-rock time. I felt queasy, unclean.

“D.?”

“I’ll meet you there.”

The address was on North Crescent Drive, in the Beverly Hills Flats- the pricey prairie stretching from Santa Monica Boulevard to Sunset, and from Doheny west to the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Houses in the Flats range from two-bedroom “tear-downs” that wouldn’t stand out in a working-class tract to mansions big enough to corral a politician’s ego. The tear-downs go for a million and a half.

Once a quiet, cushy neighborhood of doctors, dentists, and show-business types, the Flats has become a repository for very new, very flashy foreign money of questionable origin. All that easy cash has brought with it a mania for monument-building, unfettered by tradition or taste, and as I drove down Crescent half the structures seemed to be in various phases of construction. The final products would have done Disney proud: Turreted Gray-stone Castle sans moat but cum tennis court, Mock-Moorish Mini-Mosque, Italianate-Dutch Truffle, Haute Gingerbread Haunted House, Post-Moderne Free-form Fantasy.