Silent Partner

I’d arrived at this place hating him, prepared to stoke my hate. But I felt like putting my arm around him.

Then I thought of dead bodies, a pile of them, and said, “Your temporary plan stretched to permanence.”

He nodded. “I kept searching for another way, some other arrangement. Meanwhile, Shirlee and Jasper were doing a yeoman job- amazingly so. Then Helen discovered Sharon, made her a protégée, began molding her in a fine way. I decided nothing could be better than that. I contacted Helen; we reached an agreement.”

“Helen was paid?”

“Not with money- she and her husband were too proud for that. But there were other things I could do for them. Scholarships for her children, aborting a plan to sell off corporate acreage in Willow Glen for development. For over thirty years, Magna’s guaranteed to purchase any agricultural surpluses and compensate for any losses below a specified level. Not just for Helen- for the entire town.”

“Paying them not to grow apples,” I said.

“An American tradition,” he said. “You should taste Wendy’s honey and cider. Our employees love them.”

I remembered Helen’s complaint:

They won’t sell… For all intents and purposes that keeps Willow Glen a backwater speck.

Keeping Shirlee and Jasper and their charge away from prying eyes…

“How much does Helen know?” I asked.

“Her knowledge is very limited. For her sake.”

“What will become of the Ransoms?”

“Nothing will change,” he said. “They’ll continue to live wonderfully basic lives. Did you see any signs of suffering on their faces, Doctor? They don’t want for anything, would be considered well-off by most people’s standards. Helen looks out for them. Before she came along, I did.”

He allowed himself a smile. Smug.

“All right,” I said, “you’re Mother Teresa. So how come people keep dying?”

“Some people,” he said, “deserve to die.”

“Sounds like a quotation from Chairman Belding.”

No answer.

I said, “What about Sharon? Did she deserve to die for trying to learn who she was?”

He stood, stared down at me. All self-doubt gone, once again The Man In Charge.

“Words can communicate only so much,” he said. “Come with me.”

We headed out toward the desert. He aimed a penlight at the ground, highlighting pitted soil, mammalian clumps of scrub, saguaro cactus stretching skyward.

About a half-mile in, the beam settled on a small, stream-lined Fiberglas vehicle- the golf-cart I’d visualized during my ride with Hummel. Dark paint, a roll bar, knobby, off-road tires. A forward-slanting M on the door.

He got behind the wheel and motioned me in. No blindfold for this ride. I was either trusted or doomed. He flipped several switches. Headlights. The whine of the electric engine. Another flip and the hum rose in frequency. We moved forward with surprising speed, twice as fast as the bumper-car pace Hummel had taken- the sadist. Faster than I’d thought possible from an electric machine. But then, this was high-tech territory. The Patent Ranch.

We rode for more than an hour without exchanging a word, sailing across stretches of chalky wasteland. The air was still hot and grew fragrant, a mild herbaceous scent.

Vidal coughed a lot as the vehicle churned up clouds of fine clay dust, but he continued to steer with ease. The granite mountains were faint pencil marks on black construction paper.

He flipped another switch and made the moon appear, gigantic, milky-white, and earthbound.

Not the moon at all, but a giant golf ball, illuminated from within.

A geodesic dome, perhaps thirty feet in diameter.

Vidal pulled up to it and parked. The surface of the dome was white plastic hexagonal panels framed in tubular white metal. I looked for the booth Seaman Cross had described, the one he’d sat in while communicating with Belding. But the only access to the building was a white door.

“The Basket-Case Billionaire,” I said.

“A stupid little book,” said Vidal. “Leland got it into his head that he needed to be chronicled.”

“Why’d he pick Cross?”

We got out of the cart. “I haven’t the slightest idea- I told you he never let me inside his head. I was out of the country when he cooked up the deal. Later he changed his mind and demanded Cross fold up his tent in return for a cash payment. Cross took the money, but went ahead with the book. Leland was very displeased.”

“Another search-and-destroy mission.”

“Everything was handled legally- through the courts.”

“Burglarizing his storage locker wasn’t exactly working within the system. Did you use the same guys for the Fontaine break-in?”

His expression said that wasn’t worth responding to. We started walking.

I said, “What about Cross’s suicide?”

“Cross was weak-willed, couldn’t cope.”

“You’re saying it was a genuine suicide?”

“Absolutely.”

“If he hadn’t done himself in, would you have let him live?”

He smiled and shook his head. “As I told you before, Doctor, I don’t squash people. Besides, Cross was no threat. No one believed him.”

The door was white and seamless. He placed his hand on the knob, looked at me, and let the message sink in:

Cross had poisoned the well when it came to Leland Belding stories.

No one would believe me. This day had never occurred.

I looked up at the dome. Starlight made it shimmer, like a giant jellyfish. The plastic panels gave off a new-car smell. Vidal twisted the knob.

I stepped in. The door closed behind me. A moment later, I heard the buggy depart.

I looked around, expecting screens, consoles, keyboards, a Flash Gordon tangle of electronic pasta.

But it was just a big room, interior walls sheathed in white plastic. The rest could have come out of any suburban tract home. Ice-blue carpet. Oak furniture. Console TV. Stereo components topping a record cabinet. Prefab bookcase and matching magazine basket. An efficiency kitchen off to one side. Potted plants. Framed samplers.

Apple drawings.

And three beds arranged parallel to one another, as in a bunk room. Or ward: the first two were hospital setups with push-button position controls and chromium swivel tables.

The nearest one was empty save for something on the pillow. I took a closer look. It was a toy airplane- a bomber, painted dark, with a forward-slanting M on the door.

In the second, a crippled woman lay under a cheerful quilt. Immobile, gape-mouthed, some gray streaking her black hair, but otherwise unchanged in the six years since I’d last seen her. As if disability had so dominated her body it rendered her ageless. She took a deep sucking breath and air came out in a squeak.

A waft of perfume filtered through the new-car ambience. Soap and water, fresh grass.

35

Sharon sat on the edge of the third bed, hands folded in her lap. A smile, tissue-thin, graced her lips.

She wore a long white dress that buttoned down the front. Her hair was combed out, parted in the middle. No makeup, no jewelry. Her eyes purplish in the light of the dome.

She fidgeted under my stare. Long fingers. Arms smooth as butter. Breasts straining against the dress. Silk. Expensive, but it resembled a nurse’s uniform.

“Hello, Alex.”

Shirlee Ransom’s swivel table held tissues, a hot water bottle, a mucus aspirator, a water pitcher, and an empty drinking glass. I picked up the glass, rolled it between my palms, and put it down.

“Come,” she said.

I sat down next to her, said, “Risen like Lazarus.”

“Never gone,” she said.

“Someone else is.”

She nodded.

I said, “The red dress? Strawberry daiquiris?”

“Her.”

“Sleeping with your patients?”

She shifted so that our flanks touched. “Her. She wanted to hurt me, didn’t care she was hurting others in the process. I didn’t know a thing until the cancellations started pouring in. I couldn’t understand it. Everything had been going so well- mostly short-term cases, but everyone liked me. I phoned them. Most of them refused to talk to me. A couple of wives got on, full of rage, threatening. It was like a bad dream. Then Sherry told me what she’d done. Laughing. She’d been staying with me, had taken my office key and made a copy. Used it to get into my files, picked out the ones who sounded cute, offered them free follow-up visits and… did them, then dumped them. That’s the way she put it. When I was calm enough, I asked her why. She said she’d be damned if she’d let me play doctor and lord it over her.”