L a 46, p.15
L.A. 46, page 15
“Nothing,” Lieutenant Travers said, grimly, “but fifty three-grain seconal tablets. Now let me ask you another question, Dr. Gam. You just said that Smallwood here was probably the only man who refused to have relations with her. Didn’t you?”
“Didn’t I what?”
“Ever refuse to have relations with her.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Then you admit you were more than her psychiatrist?”
Gam smiled thinly. “No. Miss Ames never offered herself to me. But then I’m not as young or good-looking as Dr. Smallwood.” He paused briefly, continued. “Not that I think her feeling of rejection was deep enough to cause her to deliberately take her life. Now that you’ve dragged Smallwood into this, I have no doubt how the story will be slanted in the press and over the air. But if it was in my province, I know how I’d sign the death certificate. I’d list the demise as accidental.”
“Accidental?”
“You asked my opinion. That’s it. The way I see it, Gloria conceived a passion for Dr. Smallwood. At first, with all apologies to Dr. Smallwood, it was probably merely a passing fancy. She was too shallow to know real emotion. If he had acceded to her wishes, they would have enjoyed a short if torrid affair. But when he refused to be two of the proverbial bare legs in her bed, it became an obsession with her. And, as obsessions will, it grew. Then when she phoned him last night and demanded he come to her and his only response was to ask if she was ill, I can almost see her mind work. To gain her objective, she decided to become ill, knowing that if she was he would come to her. To that end, she took a small handful of the sleeping pills he’d prescribed. But unfortunately she failed to take one important factor into consideration.”
“What factor was that?”
“I believe the medical report lists her alcohol blood level at 0.46 percent.”
“That is correct.”
“Then there you are. If, instead of investigating her death, you had been booking her on a charge of driving while intoxicated, an alcohol blood level of 0.46 would have classified her as dead drunk. More than that. It would have indicated she was not merely 100 percent incapable of operating a car, but a little over twice incapable. And the same thing holds true for the reasoning process. She didn’t intend to kill herself. She merely wanted to be wanted. But when she took the seconal she was so drunk that before she could call Dr. Smallwood and tell him what she’d done, she flopped down and passed out on the bed on which her maid found her in a dying condition this morning.”
Smallwood looked gratefully at his fellow doctor.
A number of the reporters left the room to phone their papers. Dr. Gam took his feet from the table and stood up.
“Well, gentlemen, I don’t know about the rest of you, but it’s two o’clock in the morning and I’m tired. Because Miss Ames was one of my patients, I’ve tried to be cooperative. I drove out to her ranch this morning. At Lieutenant Travers’ request, I drove out here tonight to be present while Dr. Smallwood was being interrogated. But as of now I’m up to my psyche with cooperating. So, if no one has any objection, I’m going home and go to bed. Can I drop you somewhere, Dr. Smallwood?”
“Thank you, no, Doctor,” the other man said. “My wife is waiting for me. But thanks for the offer and for the moral support.”
Gam walked out of the room into the foyer of the squat, one-story building and toward the main door fronting on Alternate Highway U.S. 101. As he passed the booking desk, the young woman standing in front of it looked at him incuriously, then back at the door of the room he’d just left.
The skirt and blouse she was wearing were ordinary. She was tall and rather angular. Her face could be called plain. She looked more like Wellesley or Vassar than Malibu Beach. But if she was Mrs. Smallwood, Dr. Smallwood was a lucky man. There was a reflected inner strength and self-sufficiency in the young woman’s face that he seldom saw in any of his patient’s faces. In Ernie Katz’s terminology, the odds were a hundred to one against her ever being in need of a psychiatrist’s couch. She would never feel insecure or have to prove to herself she was wanted. She had what she wanted of life. She had her husband, her home, and her children.
Not, Gam thought, wryly, that the fact that they were • a normal, ordinary, nice young couple would keep the newspapers from crucifying Dr. Smallwood in the morning. Directly or indirectly, he was responsible for the desecration and destruction of a symbol. He’d dared to be different. He’d dared to spit in the lap of Baal. Because he was in love with his wife and perfectly satisfied with their connubial relations, he was big news. He was the decadent dissenter who had refused to pay tribute to Ishtar by sleeping with her high priestess.
Who did he think he was? What was he, some kind of a nut? Smallwood would be lucky if he had any practice left when the reporters finished with him.
There had to be a moral in it somewhere, but for the moment it escaped Gam. He pushed open the door of the Sheriff’s substation and walked out into the night. The weather continued warm, but the coastal fog, as predicted in the evening paper, was so thick it was difficult to distinguish the shapes of the cars speeding by only a few yards away.
“A cutie, eh?” a highway patrolman standing beside his car said. “You’d think they’d learn, but no. We’ve had two Code 30s so far. And from now until morning we’ll be scraping them off the pavement all the way from Point Concepcion to Dago.”
16
The fog was self-contained in a narrow coastal belt. Dr. Gam drove out of it shortly after turning up Sunset Boulevard at its western terminus, a few miles south of the Sheriff’s Department substation at Malibu Beach. Because of the daytime smog and traffic snarls resulting from the influx of hundreds of thousands of newcomers into the area, early morning was one of the few times when it was still a pleasure to drive. Ignoring the posted speed limit, Gam drove rapidly but not fast enough to attract attention to his car. One M.D. in the soup was enough.
The more he thought about Smallwood, the more Gam wondered if his fellow physician had been mentally mature in taking the stand that he had with Gloria. If he’d done what she wanted him to, Gloria would be alive. Smallwood, at least from a Freudian viewpoint, would have experienced a refreshing interlude in his marital relations. Much more important, instead of facing public censure and ridicule in the morning, he would be well on his way to becoming a prosperous society doctor with a proved bedside manner, much sought after by wealthy middle-aged matrons eager to experience a vicarious thrill through being examined by the same hands that had examined Gloria Ames.
Gam pursued the train of thought. On the other hand, in the best Judeo-Christian tradition that spumed the findings of Freud and Jung and Adler and not only idealized individualized love but made it part of its sacrament, Smallwood seemed quite content to be burned at the stake rather than relinquish his principles.
You paid your money and you took your choice. Gam wondered if he could love one woman that much. He thought the answer was yes, if he could choose the woman. Unfortunately that particular woman, scarcely more than a girl, was not only already married, she was several months pregnant by a husband who either didn’t appreciate or know what he had. If that wasn’t enough, she thought so little of Gam, at least professionally, that as recently as yesterday afternoon he hadn’t been able to get her to confide in him what was troubling her.
Gam was completely honest with himself as he drove past the dark and silent campus of U.C.L.A. It was a ridiculous situation. Perhaps he ought to see a psychiatrist. But, call it biochemical attraction or what you would, although he’d certainly never let her know how he felt, he’d been in love with Eva Mazeric since she and Mazeric had moved into the Casa del Sol.
Love, in itself a more or less meaningless word in psychoanalysis, was defined by the dictionary as:
love (luv), n. (ME. love, luve; AS.lufu; akin to OHG. luba & more remotely, G. lebe; IE. base, to be fond of; cf. LIBIDO, LIBIDINOUS, LEF, LUST), 1. a strong affection for or attachment or devotion to a person or persons. 2. a strong liking or interest in something. 3. a strong, usually passionate, affection for a person of the opposite sex.
Gam was amused at himself. Nor was his regard purely physical. Whoever had taught her, she had had excellent teachers. He admired her agile mind almost as much as he desired her body. With Eva home and waiting for him, idiotic as it appeared on the surface, he would probably have made the same decision as Smallwood, if for another reason. He wouldn’t have wanted to waste one cc. of his strength in anything so palpably inferior.
If, as G. B. Shaw was reputed to have said, to be in love was to exaggerate greatly the difference between one woman and all others, Eva Mazeric had that difference. He hadn’t canceled his appointments for that afternoon and started out to get drunk because a psychotic patient had been stupid enough to misjudge her alcoholic capacity. He’d started to get drunk because every time he got within five feet of Eva Mazeric he caught on fire and he hoped that a mild drunk might help put out the blaze.
He slowed for the traffic signal at the intersection of Doheny Drive and the boulevard, then drove on with the green light. There was, however, one guaranteed effective type of treatment for his disease. If he was lucky, Colette would be in her apartment and disengaged. The thought both pleased and amused Gam. The blackhaired girl in Apartment 10 was a capable practitioner of her art, able and willing, for a fee, to alleviate certain forms of acute distress. However, if all the active and associate members of her profession were as mentally uncomplicated as she was, three fourths of the psychiatrists in the world would starve to death.
He would never forget the first night he’d contracted for her services. It was shortly after the Mazerics had moved into the building and he’d fallen in love with Eva. It had also been one of those days. Enroute to his office that morning, a city garbage truck had run a red light and totaled the brand-new car he was driving. When he finally reached his office, a deputy collector from the Internal Revenue Service, unsatisfied with his last return, had been waiting to discuss the matter with him and their discussion had cost him three thousand dollars. He’d spent most of the rest of the day in court testifying for the defendant in a particularly involved case in which a jury elected to ignore the expert testimony and find for the plaintiff. In an attempt to drown what had been a very unpleasant day, after leaving his office he had deliberately gotten high, so high that Patsy Kolowski had insisted on holding his car keys and at two o’clock in the morning when the bar closed he hadn’t been able to get a cab and had had to stagger the few blocks up the hill to the Casa del Sol.
For a change wearing a smart dress and a hat and shoes and stockings and smelling beautifully expensive, Colette had been sitting alone in the dimly lighted lanai smoking a last cigarette.
“Well, hello there,” he’d said.
“Good morning, Dr. Gam,” she’d greeted him.
Then, exuding whiskey fumes and dripping self-pity all over the flagstones, because he hadn’t wanted to be alone in his sterile penthouse, he’d staggered over and sat beside her, exchanging banalities until the musk of sex emanating from her had almost choked him and he’d asked:
“Your apartment or mine?”
“I come high, you know,” she’d said.
“I know.”
“Your place, then,” she’d agreed. “I usually never do business in the building in which I live. But I’ll make an exception in your case.”
What followed had been pure, undiluted sex. He’d seen her around the pool any number of times in the bikinis she affected, but until he’d seen her in the nude he’d never realized how truly exquisite she was.
Colette’s technique, Gam reflected, was comparable to that of a topflight genito-urinary surgeon, a craftsman who liked his work. The few times he’d patronized her he’d expected momentarily to hear the black-haired girl call out:
“Scalpel, retractor, catheter, sponge.”
Only Colette’s patients never died. They only thought they were going to. Drunk as he’d been when she began to operate, in less than four minutes he had never been more sober nor less amorous.
On subsequent visits, once his needs had been cared for, they’d talked. Once, curious as he always was about such matters, he asked her how she’d gotten into the business and she told him, beginning by asking a question.
“Did you ever live in a small town?”
“No,” he admitted. “I never did.”
“I was born in one,” she told him. “A wide place in the road called Puma Springs, up on the high plateau in New Mexico, with nothing around it for miles but desert and a few painted buttes. I’m one fourth Indian, you know. Mescalero. But they must have been a traveling tribe. Because five or six years ago, when I got tired of listening to the coyotes, I got the hell out of there even if I did have to lay a rodeo rider passing through for transportation. And what I mean he got good mileage. I almost fell in love with the guy. But when we got this far, the s.o.b. wanted me to hustle for him.”
“And did you?” he asked her.
“Not on your little tepee,” Colette told him. “No man is living off my behind. Instead, I told him where he could go and I took the only job I could get, working stags. Have you ever been to a stag?”
“I’ve been to a few,” he admitted.
“Then you know what they’re like. In the act I did, I had to crouch in a big papier-mâché cake while a dirty talking M.C. fired up the crowd. Then, on cue, completely naked except for a pair of long white gloves and a wedding veil and a pair of silver shoes, I popped up out of the cake as the door prize and the lush who won me got to take me into an anteroom. But it wasn’t even good sex. All it was was dirty. So, after I’d worked a few jobs, I knew it wasn’t for me and I got a job hopping cars in a drive-in and hustling when I got off work until I built up the clientèle I have now, mostly big-time salesmen and executives, older men on unlimited expense accounts whose wives are so busy with their clubs and their kids and their pet charities they’ve forgotten why the guy married them in the first place.”
“And you seem to be doing all right,” he told her.
“I am,” Colette assured him. “I’m putting away plenty. It’s nice, clean work. There’s just enough Indian in me to enjoy lying around a pool doing nothing most of the time. So why should I wear out my brains or my feet working in an office or hopping cars forty-five hours a week for one tenth of what I’m making?”
Leaving morality and convention out of it, it was as good an answer as any. Gam slackened the speed of his car as he neared the ramp leading down to the subterranean garage under the Casa del Sol. However, patronizing Colette to neutralize the natural phenomenon induced whenever he thought of Eva in a carnal sense was merely a form of mental catharsis and the ensuing physical relief purely transitory. What he should do was form some more or less permanent attachment for some sweet young thing, or one not so young. Both schools of thought were in accord on that. It was something to consider. Even if she was in her apartment and disengaged, it could be he would continue right on to his own apartment. He was, after all, a mature man thirty-eight years old, at the moment overwrought and overstimulated. Besides, going to bed with girls like Colette was a gamble. It might be nice, clean work but it left a residue, and one of these nights he’d come up with the clap and they’d take his Eagle Scout merit badge away.
He parked his car in its stall and walked toward the self-service elevator and was relieved of making a decision as Mr. Morton and Ernie Katz stepped out of the shadows.
“Well, finally,” Katz said.
Mr. Morton added, “You see, Doctor, using your answering service we trailed you to the Sheriff’s Department substation at Malibu. But when I talked to the watch commander he said you’d just left.”
Dr. Gam found his cigarettes and lit one. “What’s your problem, gentlemen?”
Katz answered before Morton could. “Eva Mazeric. Charlie just came back from trying to talk to her, but the poor kid is hysterical and she says she won’t talk to anyone but you. She wouldn’t even let him bail her out. And we feel, for her sake, this should be handled diplomatically. That’s why we waited down here for you. Until we find out the score, we don’t want any of the other tenants, or her husband, to know we’ve located her.” Neither man was making sense to Gam. He said so. “Score? Located her? What the hell are you talking about? Where is Eva?”
Mr. Morton told him. “In the women’s drunk tank in the Hollywood Division Station, booked for drunk and disorderly conduct, assault and battery, and for malicious damage to private property.”
“You’re putting me on,” Gam said. “You have to be.”
“No,” Katz assured him. “I don’t suppose you know she’s been missing all afternoon and evening?”
“No. The last time I saw Eva was in my office, around two o’clock.”
Katz continued. “Well, she didn’t come back here. And now it seems that all the time we were calling the receiving hospitals and the district stations, she was sitting in a booth at Paddy’s, lapping up the stuff. The way the arresting officers got the story from Paddy, she walked in around nine o’clock and just sat quiet-like by herself, keeping the martinis coming. Then, about an hour ago, some joker makes a play for her. And instead of telling him off like a lady should, she belted him over the head with a fifth of whiskey and when Paddy tried to keep her from killing the guy, she threw the bottle at him and it went through his back bar mirror.”
