Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

Ten minutes later, he was shown into the crowded office of a handsome, lean, erect black man of about his own age. Houghton had beautiful liquid eyes and stern features. His white smock was crisp and he had a stethoscope around his neck.

As he shook Thorne’s hand, he said, ‘I hear the dragon lady over at Cedar’s worked you over pretty good last night. The nurse who gave you my name put in a good word for you, but I feel protective about Janet. She was brutally beaten with feet and fists. At least no knives, clubs or soda bottles. Ended up with a broken arm and broken collarbone, a cracked shin, a permanent metal pin in one wrist, two cracked ribs, and a bruised but not ruptured spleen. If you’re bringing her more trouble...’

‘I just want to ask her about a friend of hers.’

‘Can I believe that?’ asked Houghton almost to himself. ‘Well, we’ll see. If your friend was involved in any way...’

‘No friend, I’ve never met him. I’m just looking for him.’

They locked eyes. Houghton looked away first.

‘Okay. All the evidence of sexual assault was there, but no oral, anal, or vaginal penetration took place. She was gutsy and stoic at the same time. Never a word of complaint. Not even a groan out of her. She just took it. A couple of days later, a quiet, tough outdoorsman in his fifties talked with me at the hospital. He said he’d like to kill the man who did it. I asked if he was a tough guy, and he said No, just an angry one.’

‘Did he give you a name, address, anything?’

‘Nothing. I never saw him again. He left a cash deposit here when I was at the hospital that more than paid for her medical and doctor expenses. He’s even got a refund coming.’

‘Did Janet leave an address with you?’

He evaded a direct answer by saying, ‘She checked herself out of the hospital before she should have, saw me twice here at the office, then never came back. Thanks for stopping by.’

Dismissal. Without even thinking, Thorne said, ‘There’s a psychiatrist in D.C. named Sharon Dorst.’ He rattled off her number. ‘Call her. Ask her about Thorne.’

Houghton hesitated, then handed Thorne a card with his office phone and fax on it.

‘Give me a day to think about it,’ he said.

Thorne knew he should get out of LA as soon as possible. Right now the FBI could be putting an intercept tap on the doctor’s phone. But he couldn’t leave empty-handed. Janet Kestrel was who he was looking for. He had no other possible leads. Maybe Houghton had believed him. Maybe he even would call Sharon Dorst.

So, a day for Houghton to think, a day for Thorne to kill. He decided to start at the Los Angeles Main Library at Figueroa and Flower, a venerable place with mosaics around the interior of the rotunda depicting the founding of the city by Spanish priests. At the main reference desk on the second floor, he paid five dollars for access to one of their computers, used a key word search to call up the post-nomination press coverage of Wallberg’s campaign that he’d barely glanced through before being forced to abandon it at the Mayflower Hotel.

He found a filler item he’d missed in D.C. A man had tried to rob one of Wallberg’s media consultants in the gift shop at the El Tovar Hotel on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. The consultant’s name was Nisa Mather.

Since Flagstaff and Phoenix were the population centers closest to Grand Canyon National Park, Thorne brought up their papers’ coverage of the event. The candidate, Gus Wallberg, was hiking down on the canyon floor when a grey-haired, uniformed man mopping the gift shop floor spoke to Nisa Mather for a minute or so, then tried to grab her purse.

She screamed for security, the man fled with what one fanciful reporter called a wounded-wolf lope, and jumped into a dark green SUV driven by a woman. Another Wallberg aide, Kurt Jaeger, ran after the 4x4 but couldn’t get the license number.

Corwin? Asking why she betrayed him? Maybe threatening to kill her husband? So she screamed for security, then said he’d tried to snatch her purse. In a way, gave him enough time to escape, with Janet Kestrel driving the get-away vehicle?

Back in the Post’s coverage, he found an even more provocative item. Two weeks before election night, Wallberg was relaxing for a day at the posh Desert Palms Resort and Spa in California’s Mojave Desert. While taking a midnight dip alone in the spa’s natural hot springs pool, he was accosted by a naked man. Secret Service agents fired shots, the assailant fled.

The man being naked, far from branding him as a nut in Thorne’s eyes, suggested that the intruder had been Corwin. At night in unknown terrain, you could move much more quietly naked.

He Googled the Desert Palms Resort and Spa, then used one of his phone cards to make a one-night reservation for Benjamin Schutz. Yes, mid-week, they had a single available.

Uniformed guards checked his i.d. at the resort’s front gate before letting him through the high enclosing adobe wall into the compound. Supposedly the place had been built by Al Capone; there was even a Capone suite hewn out of the native rock, all antique furniture and art deco, where Wallberg had stayed when he had been there.

Thorne’s room was in a tamarisk grove down by the picnic area. There was a tennis court surrounded by rare California clump grass; there was an exercise pool flanked by ornate teaberry bushes; there were ‘sun bins’ designed for solo nude sunbathing. The gambling casino of Capone’s day had been converted into the Casino Restaurant, with plush draperies, a huge fireplace, and a chunky refectory table that should have been gracing a medieval monastery. Perhaps it once had.

He bought swim trunks at the gift shop, draped a big woolly bath towel over his shoulders, and padded up the walk past the mud baths and sauna and massage rooms to the hot pool. It was a blue, smooth-bottomed concrete cup, going from one foot to five feet in depth, shielded by decorative rocks and shrubs. At one end, the hot natural mineral water boiled up at regular intervals to spill down a man-made cliff into the pool. The closer to this overflow, the hotter the water.

Thorne drifted in the hundred-degree velvet half-darkness, waiting for just the right security guard to stroll by. Had him! In his fifties, with a lined, leathery face, hard eyes, thinning sandy hair, a flawless uniform, and a military bearing. Perfect.

‘Vietnam?’ asked Thorne, dog-paddling to the side of the pool. ‘You can always tell a guy who’s seen action.’

‘Twenty-five years as an MP, stateside and overseas.’

‘Ex-Ranger myself. Panama. Desert Storm.’ He shook water out of his eyes and hauled himself up on the side of the pool. ‘They were telling me about that crazy nut jumped the president last fall. Were you working here then?’

The guard glanced around, then sat down on a lounge chair.

‘I gotta tell you, there was something screwy about that whole thing. Hell, this naked guy, he was just talking with Wallberg, and then the feds showed up. He shoved Wallberg underwater and took off. They started shooting. They found blood but didn’t find him.’ His thin, hard lips curved in contempt. As Thorne had hoped, this ex-MP had no respect for civilian security forces. ‘They couldn’t find him, so they claimed he crawled off into the desert and died.’

‘Did they even hit him?’

‘Hell no. That guy took off like a scalded-ass ape. No way did he take a round. I think he scraped his head on the rock deliberately to give ’em the blood. I didn’t see his face, but he was about the President’s age. Rangy and quick even though he had a limp. Wouldn’t surprise me if he was ex-military.’

At seven a.m. the next day, Sammy Spaulding met Hatfield at the unobtrusive corner of LAX where the FBI landed its jets. He whistled softly when he saw the Gulfstream.