2.25 p.m.

In Otto’s bar I was gazing at a photograph of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in a 1940s world of tuxedoes and clinging silk dresses, when Emily Ford arrived from her downtown office. She told me at once she was rushed, she didn’t have much time, she’d interrupted a meeting to come here. I put my hand on her elbow and led her to a corner of the room.

I set my Scotch on the table and said, ‘You better sit down.’

‘OK. I’m sitting. What’s this all about?’

‘Look me straight in the eye and tell me you don’t know.’

‘What is this, Jerry? You phoned me. You ask me to get my ass over here. I’m in the middle of being grilled by these two characters from Washington, Attila the Hunette and her jolly sidekick. I’ve got about nine minutes before I have to get back and face them again.’

‘I met them already,’ I said. ‘They paid me a call.’

‘What impression did you get? Do they want to bury me and protect Caesar?’

I ignored her questions. I had another agenda. ‘You really don’t know why I was so persistent about meeting you, do you?’

‘Mind-reading isn’t one of my talents, Jerry. What is it I’m supposed to know?’

I skipped the story of Consuela. I told her about the demands for her file.

Then I told her that her records were missing from my floor-safe.

Finally, I told her about Sondra.

Emily stared at me. ‘Sweet Jesus, Jerry. I don’t know what to say.’

‘Just be honest with me, Emily. Tell me you have nothing to do with the theft from my safe.’

‘You think I stole my own records? I don’t even know where you store them, Jerry. God, you’re being absurd. You’re also being extremely naïve. Even if I had my own file, do you think I’d admit it? Or were you counting on your intuition? You’d look at me and you’d just know? Anyway, why would I steal my own records?’

‘Emily, you have a great motive. You think you’re vulnerable because of what your records contain, so you want them –’

‘I’ve never read my file, Jerry, I don’t have a clue what you’ve written about my sessions with you. How damaging could it be?’

‘It depends on who’s reading the files, and what they’re looking for. Somebody searching for evidence of a certain mental instability in the past – OK, he’d find that. Somebody looking for evidence that these episodes are not behind you once and for all, well, he might find what he needs too. Somebody else would say your mental health was just tickety-boo, first-class.’

‘The material is wide open to interpretation,’ she said.

‘Right. It’s not an exact science. The files could be used one way or the other. In a court of law, they’d be just as useful to the defense as to the prosecution, OK? Let’s put that to one side, Emily. What it boils down to is this: You have this exaggerated notion that because you were once a psychiatric patient, you’ll be crucified when it comes to the big job in DC. You hear the sound of all your ambition going down the toilet. So, you don’t want to take any chances with your file, you just feel it’s safer in your hands than somebody else’s. So what do you do? You arrange to have it stolen. I don’t know how. I’m the only person with the combination to the safe, and so far as I could see, nobody jimmied it.’

‘Jerry, I did not steal my own fucking file. What you’re really telling me is somebody has my private psychiatric records. Some guy’s walking around out there with the inside of my mind in his hands, for Christ’s sake. All because you didn’t have my file secured. That’s criminally irresponsible of you. And it’s a wholesale disaster for me. And you don’t know who –’

‘Emily, my wife’s been seized. And if I don’t find your file and hand it over …’ I didn’t complete the sentence. It led into narrow black areas, clefts of fear.

‘This is outrageous,’ she said. ‘You don’t take security measures? People come and go as they please, they just traipse in and out of your office?’

‘People don’t just come and go,’ I said. ‘Jane’s always at her desk. Nobody gets in to see me unless they have an appointment.’

‘You got any reason for suspecting sweet, reliable Jane of this theft?’

‘None. Even if she knew the combination of my safe, she wouldn’t have taken anything out of it. I trust her one hundred per cent.’

‘Maybe somebody has some kind of hold on her, only you don’t know it. Maybe she’s been threatened by somebody. She’s scared.’

‘OK. Let’s imagine she’s been threatened. She still doesn’t have the combination.’

‘If you rule her out, who does that leave?’

‘If I rule out both her and you, then we’re looking for somebody who wants information about you. Why? Let’s imagine he’s exploring ways of destroying you. He doesn’t like the idea of you being the next AG. You have too many axes to grind and one of them is swinging a little too close to his head.’

I drew the tips of my fingers across my eyes. A current of apprehension ran through me, a tiny little shock. I wondered if Emily was lying, if she had the file, despite all her protests. I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t read her face.

I said, ‘At the same time, the mysterious party who abducted Sondra also has the hots for this file, and maybe for the same reasons. How many goddam enemies have you got?’

‘I’ve got them in Washington, and right here in LA. I’ve got them in the exalted ranks of organized crime, and in refined private clubs where certain kinds of lawyers drink ancient port and pretend they don’t have scum for clients. I mean, some of these guys’ client-lists read like the executive boards of organized-crime syndicates, for Christ’s sake. Then there are dope dealers who probably burn me in effigy. And the civil liberties people don’t always like my attitude. It’s a big catalog, Jerry.’ She was quiet a second. ‘Has it crossed your mind it may have been a professional job? Somebody hired especially to get their hands on my file?’

‘I hadn’t considered a professional. Even so, it was my responsibility to secure your records, and I’m sorry. I assumed the safe was impregnable.’ I’d assumed the same thing about my life.

Emily was quiet a moment. ‘You want Sondra, I want my file back. The idea of any old sonofabitch waltzing around out there with my private records is goddam unacceptable to me, Jerry.’

‘Maybe I should go to the cops,’ I said.

‘Oh, not very bright,’ she said. ‘Cops have a tendency to bungle really sensitive things, believe me … Have you considered the possibility that one of your patients might be involved? Somebody who infiltrated your office because he wanted my file, someone you took on as a patient and who turned out to be a thief?’

An infiltrator. A phony patient. The notion worried me – the idea that somebody had convinced me they were mentally sick or unbalanced, that I’d opened my door to him or her. It angered me to think that one of them might be a fraud plausible enough to deceive me. I considered my list of patients; I hadn’t taken on any new ones recently. Besides, it was unlikely I would have left any patient alone in my office long enough to roll back the rug, open the safe, take out the box marked 2567, remove the contents, return the box, shut the safe, replace the rug, and then smuggle the file out without being seen. More likely, it was somebody who’d come when the office was closed; and since there had been no sign of a forced entry, the person who’d stolen the file had a door key as well as the combination.

There were three keys to the office. Jane Steel had one, I had another, and the security guard, Grogue, had a third. But keys were easily duplicated. Maybe somebody had stolen Grogue’s, copied it, then returned the original before he noticed it missing. Maybe my key was the one that had been taken and duplicated. Or Jane’s. And then the thief had come quietly in the dark, unlocked the front door, walked into my office and, with all the time in the world, had picked open the safe, removed Emily Ford’s records, then slipped away. Somehow.

‘Forget the cops, Jerry,’ Emily said. ‘Frankly, I think you’d be better off making a check of your patients’ records, see if anything strange turns up. But all your patients are a little strange, aren’t they Jerry?’ She looked at me curiously. ‘So what do we do?’

‘We?’

‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘Should I? You only want your records. You don’t give a damn about Sondra.’

‘You think you can work this thing alone? Fine, Jerry. Fly solo. See how much gas is in your tank, buddyboy.’ She turned away from me, looked in the direction of the bar. She said, ‘I have access to a FBI database so vast it would blow your mind. I could run a check on your patients in the blink of an eye.’

I must have looked hesitant, because she said, ‘You’re quite prepared to trade my file in return for your wife, right? Don’t even try to deny it, Jerry. It’s written all over your face. So I don’t want to hear any guff about you having this ethical need to protect your patients. Just print me up a list of them and I’ll feed it through the database, nobody will know I’ve done it except you and me. And I’m not telling.’

She was right, I had no claim to the moral high-ground. ‘Tell me what you’d be looking for,’ I said.

‘Anything that stinks like a long-dead fish. Anything that’s off-center. Maybe I’ll find a name that has some connection with me. Somebody from the past. Somebody I’d forgotten. Some kind of bell that rings. It would take me about thirty minutes to run the names, Jerry. And if you’re still queasy about it, you don’t even have to hand the list to me personally. Print it out. Leave it on your desk, turn your back.’

She was persuasive, I had to give her that; she spoke quietly, creating an atmosphere I found unsettlingly intimate.

‘What will you do without this wonderfully generous offer of help I’m holding out to you? I’m talking about a computer that has everything. Supersonic bells and whistles, and faster than Superman on his best day.’

‘Let’s say I cooperate, and by some amazing stroke of luck we locate your records. What happens then? Are you going to hand them over to me so that I can trade them for Sondra’s life? For the baby’s life?’

‘Baby? Sondra’s pregnant? Ouch. I have a feeling you just punched me below the belt.’ She tilted her head back and appeared thoughtful. I looked at her; in repose, she was lovely in an angular way. She’d never married. She’d had lovers, but her work had always taken precedence. Ambition had overruled her heart. She was on a fast-track and she’d been traveling that way for a long time; she’d never allowed anything or anyone to stand in her way, and now there was a chance that her career might crash and burn. But she wasn’t about to be thrown off that particular locomotive without a serious fight to stay on board. She’d inherited her father’s cast-iron determination: Robbie Ford, public prosecutor, didn’t understand defeat and knew even less about compromise. Emily had inherited his virtues and flaws, his steely obligation to the law as well as his pig-headedness, his focus as well as his inflexibility.

My mind raced to the kidnappers – and suddenly I had one of those little flashes that illuminate the darkness which clouds our brains much of the time. It was either the flare of an inspiration – or the small candle-flame of my desperation.

I said, ‘Something just occurred to me. They want a file they’ve never set eyes on. They don’t have a clue what it might contain. They don’t know what it looks like. Typed, handwritten, the kind of paper – they don’t know anything like that.’

‘And?’

‘So – I write one for them. From scratch.’

‘And you think they’d go for that?’

‘It’s worth a shot,’ I said. ‘I can make it look good. I can give it authenticity. OK, granted it sounds crazy, but I’m not thinking in a straight line at the moment.’

‘It doesn’t sound crazy to me. How long would it take to dummy something like that?’

‘An hour. Maybe more. If I type like I’m demented.’

‘How close to the truth will it have to be?’

‘Very close. Otherwise, these people will smell a fake as soon as they read it.’ And goodbye, Sondra, I thought.

‘Give me some idea what you’ll write.’

‘Simple. You came to me as a patient for grief therapy. You were having nightmares about your parents. I had to put you on some heavy-duty medication. Then I toss in some vague technical jargon: Generalized anxiety disorder. Post-traumatic stress. I can paint it on thick. I’ll say that the treatment was a success.’

‘It’s a sanitized skeleton of the real file,’ she said.

‘Basically.’

‘And there would be nothing in it that could be damaging to me if it fell into the wrong hands?’

‘I’ll make sure of it,’ I said.

‘Swear,’ she said.

‘I swear.’

She touched my knuckles with her fingertips. ‘And if it works, you get your wife back.’

‘Wife and baby,’ I said. My world was black and white, my focus narrowed down to where it could only encompass Sondra and the life of the child she carried.

‘So, at the very least we buy enough time for you to provide me with your patient list, and I see if I can make anything out of the names.’

I was still hesitant about this part. I said, ‘On the condition that you destroy it when you’re through.’

‘Deal. Straight into the shredder, Jerry. My word.’

I walked her back to her Mercedes. She unlocked the door of the car and turned to look at me. ‘I want that nomination. And I want it ratified. I want it so bad, Jerry.’

‘And I want Sondra.’

‘Two goals that don’t necessarily have to conflict,’ she said. She studied my face a moment. ‘Been in an accident? Your neck’s badly bruised,’ and she touched the contusion gently.

‘Yeah, I tripped, lost my balance,’ and I left it at that.

She didn’t look convinced. She had the kind of eyes that could sometimes penetrate the best defenses. Sharp, flinty. ‘Let me get rid of these Washington characters. You go print that list. I’ll call you.’

She got inside the car and as I watched her drive away, I thought: She really has no idea that the material stolen from my safe was already laundered, already sanitized.