After a desk officer took the information, he put Neria Torres on hold. She waited several minutes, growing increasingly impatient. The sky began to drizzle. Neria fumed. She thought of Dr Gabler and young Celeste, together in the back of the Volkswagen van. She wondered if the professor was demonstrating his “human Ouija board” exercise, the one he’d worked so charmingly on Neria herself.
Around Neria’s neck hung a polished stalk of rose quartz, which Dr Gabler had given her to help channel untapped torrents of “unconditional love.” Dickhead! thought Neria. At that very moment he was probably tuning young Celeste’s inner chakras. Until she’d met the professor, Neria Torres hadn’t known what a chakra was. Celeste undoubtedly did. She and Dr Gabler seemed to operate on the same wavelength.
The drizzle turned to a hard rain. Under Neria’s feet, the red Georgia clay turned to slop. A man with a newspaper over his head came up behind her and stood uncomfortably close. He employed noisy, urgent breathing to emphasize his need for the telephone. Neria cursed aloud and slammed down the receiver.
On the other end, at Metro police headquarters in Miami, the desk officer had been diligently crosschecking the missing husband against a list of unclaimed bodies in the morgue. He was surprised to get a possible hit: One dead man had the same name, same date of birth, same extravagant brand of wristwatch.
The offider immediately had transferred Mrs Torres’s phone call to the Homicide division. By the time a detective picked up, nobody was on the line.
Max Lamb flew from New York to San Diego to Guadalajara, where he slept for eleven hours. He woke up and called the airport hotel in Miami. Bonnie hadn’t checked in. Max lit a Bronco cigaret and fell back on the pillow.
He chewed over a scenario in which his new wife might be cheating on him with one of two certifiable lunatics, or both. He couldn’t conceive of it. The Bonnie Brooks he knew wasn’t a free spirit-that was one of the things he loved about her. Steady and predictable, that was Bonnie. To Max’s knowledge, the most impulsive thing she’d ever done was to hurl a stale pizza, Frisbee style, out the apartment window in Manhattan. When it came to sex, she was practically old-fashioned. She hadn’t slept with him until their seventh date.
So it took only minutes for Max Lamb to dismiss his worries about Bonnie’s fidelity. The ability to delude oneself on such matters was a benefit of owning a grossly inflated ego. Bottom line: Max couldn’t imagine that Bonnie would desire another man. Especially those types of men: outlaws and psychos. Impossible! He snickered, blowing smoke at the notion. She was punishing him, that was all; obviously she was still ticked off about the hurricane excursion.
Scrubbing in the shower, Max Lamb refocused on the task at hand: the obstreperous Clyde Nottage Jr, ailing chairman of Durham Gas Meat 8c Tobacco. Max’s orders were to talk some sense into the old fart, make him understand the grievous consequences of withdrawing all those expensive advertisements from print. Before Max Lamb had left New York, four Rodale & Burns executive vice presidents had individually briefed him on the importance of the Guadalajara mission. Success, Max knew, would guarantee a long and lucrative career at the agency. A home run, is how one of the honchos had put it. Turning the old man around would be a grand-slam homer in the bottom of the ninth. Clyde Nottage was one crusty old prick.
A cab took Max Lamb to the Aragon Clinic, a two-story stucco building, freshly painted and lushly landscaped, in a residential sub-division of the city. The lobby of the clinic showed evidence of recent remodeling, which unfortunately had not included central air. Max loosened his necktie and took a seat. On a glass table was a stack of informational pamphlets printed in Spanish. Curious, Max picked one up. On the first page was a drawing of a male sheep with an arrow pointing between its hind legs.
Max returned the pamphlet to the table. He wanted a smoke, but a sign on the wall said “No Fumar.” A drop of sweat rolled down his jawline. Max dabbed it away with a handkerchief.