The Broken Promise Land Page 25

  “When was this, exactly?”

  “Well now, I remember him telling us about it at a party. It was… yeah, Fourth of July. He was really pissed about the dope, so we gave him some of ours. It had only happened a couple of days before.”

  “Did Tod ever hear from her again?”

  “He never mentioned her again, but we were out of touch for a year and a half after that, when my guy decided to try the scene up in Seattle, so maybe he did.”

  Another dead end, I thought, looking down at the scrap of paper in my hand. Even though Terriss made a habit of dropping into the lives of her former husband and boyfriend when she needed something, she probably wouldn’t have turned to Tod Dodson after she robbed him. Or would she? I’d ask Jenny Gordon to find out.

  The woman was leaning in the doorway now, relaxed as if she were chatting over the fence with a neighbor. “You know,” she said, “that Patricia was really whacked out.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, Tod was a fish freak. He had this aquarium with a half dozen of… I don’t know what you call them, but tropical fish with, like, long traily fins and stuff. Patricia, she named them: Michael, Molly, Brian, Christina, Jamie, and Lisa. I remember, because she used to talk about them in her weird way like they were her kids.”

  My stomach knotted. “What did she say?”

  “Oh, stuff like, ‘Michael’s off his feed today.’ or ‘Jamie and Lisa have been fighting again.’ Really dumb stuff, and she’d go on and on. It drove Tod up the wall. Anyway, it wasn’t her naming them that freaked me. It was what she did to them.”

  “What she did?”

  “Yeah. The day she split she poisoned them.”

  “What!”

  The woman smiled and nodded, enjoying my reaction. “Yeah. Tod came home and there they were, floating belly-up, every single one of them. And next to the aquarium were two empty cans of fish food. It couldn’t’ve been an accident. The bitch deliberately poisoned Michael, Molly, Brian, Christina, Jamie, and Lisa.”

  … deliberately poisoned Michael, Molly, Brian, Christina, Jamie, and Lisa…

  … I was her victim, too… with a letter opener, in one of her black, bloody rages…

  I’d known the woman was obsessed and dangerous. But I’d had no idea of how obsessed and dangerous.

  And now I was stuck in yet another traffic jam, this one on the Santa Monica Freeway, heading for the hub of a system that was dying of slow strangulation. I wished I’d spent enough time in the area to know surface—nonfreeway—routes, but…

  As I came to a dead halt near Overland Avenue I eased Ricky’s cellular phone from my bag and punched out the Nashville number that the woman in Venice had given me. The phone rang twice and a taped male voice told me to leave a message for Tod. I did, stressing that my call was urgent.

  Eleven-oh-five. I had to be at Union Station by midnight.

  I shifted into first gear and inched along while dialing the number of Hy’s cellular unit. No answer. Why not, dammit? When I’d told him I wouldn’t be able to make the concert, he’d said for me to call him if there was any problem.

  Eleven-oh-six. By now Ricky and Rae should be on their way to the limo. They’d have an interval of security, but then he’d have to brave the crush at the station. Hy and Rats seemed to think that once they got him through the gate to the train he’d be safe enough, but I wasn’t at all sure of that—knowing what I did now.

  God, I couldn’t visualize what horrible thing might happen next. Couldn’t imagine what Terriss might be planning.

  Eleven-oh-seven. I had to get hold of somebody.

  Mick. He had a cell phone—one I’d bought him as a reward for good work last spring. I dredged up its number from memory, dialed. Again, no answer. Had he left it in his room at the hotel tonight, or…?

  Had something gone wrong at the concert? Had something happened to Ricky, to Rae, to Mick? Or to Hy?

  People I loved could be in trouble, and I was stuck in a traffic jam. The lives of people I loved could be on the line, and I was staring at the ass end of a semi trailer.

  People I loved: Ricky, Rae, Mick… Hy.

  Twenty-one

  EXCERPT FROM RAE KELLEHER’S DIARY:

  Ricky and I collapsed on the backseat of the limo, and the door shut with a solid thump. We’d run the gauntlet of screaming fans and reporters and cameras outside the amphitheatre, RKI’s guards bracing us on either side, and still somebody had managed to rip the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  He yanked the shirt off and tossed it on the floor. Laughed—as high as I’d seen him since after the concert in Sonoma County. “Red,” he said, “that’s the way they’re supposed to behave for rock stars, not for country boys like me.”

  I smiled, catching some of his excitement in spite of the lingering scariness of that half minute between the stage exit and the car. I’d always had a touch of agoraphobia, and I could see I was going to have to conquer it if I planned to stick with him. Which I did.

  “So,” I said, “you gonna board the train half naked?”

  “Nah, me half—or wholly—naked is an experience I’m saving just for you. Fortunately, my wardrobe guy figured I’d be kind of grungy after the performance, so here”—he pulled a bag from the facing seat—“we have another shirt.”

  I helped him ease it over his head and drew back to admire my brainchild: BLACKED OUT IN LOS ANGELES: THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO NOWHERE.

  Not bad, if I did say so myself, and the graphics Winterland had supplied were fantastic.

  Ricky grinned at me, then pulled me close for a hug. “I’d like to think you’re stunned by what a good-looking fellow you’ve snagged, but I suspect you’re more thrilled with the shirt.”

  “Well, I am proud of it.”

  “You deserve to be.” He pulled a bottle of champagne from the bar and popped the cork. Poured into two glasses, handed one to me, and toasted. “To us.”

  “Us.” I sipped some of the bubbly stuff and thought, I’ll never be able to tell the difference between this and the cheapo brands I’m used to, but it doesn’t matter, because neither of us cares.

  “And to you,” I said. “They loved you.”

  “Thank God.” He sobered, shaking his head. “After all this crap in the papers, I was afraid I’d be booed off the stage. You know what I noticed, though? They responded well to ‘Midnight Train,’ but the song that really got to them was ‘The Empty Place.’”

  “I noticed that, too.”

  He took my hand, slouching lower. I moved over and rested my head against his shoulder.

  “Funny about the song, Red. When I wrote it I didn’t even know you, but it turns out it’s about you, me, us.”

  “I know.”

  “Listen, what I need to do right now is sit quietly, come down some. The driver’ll let us know when we’re five minutes from the station, and then I’ll have to gear up for the crowd.”

  I’d watched him do the same before the concert, steadily building focus and energy. “How does that work?”

  “Well, you know how a producer mixes a song? He raises some sounds, lowers others; some he takes out altogether. That’s more or less what I do: raise my concentration, lower my stress level, tune out everything else.”

  “And how do you come down?”

  “Before, it was dope or booze. Now, it’s holding your hand.”

  “Five minutes, Mr. Savage.”

  “Thanks.” He released my hand and sat up straighter.

  I moved away from him, already feeling shut out.

  He noticed and cupped my chin, looking solemnly into my eyes. “Sorry, Red. It’s a strange kind of life. You sure you want any part of it?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m sure.”

  Union Station looked like a Hollywood dream: salmon stucco with turquoise and mosaic-tile trim, its mission-style facade bathed in floodlights, great spindly palms swaying along the approach. The clocktower showed eleven forty-five. And the crowd was enormous.

  Peop
le jammed the sidewalk between the building and the curb. People with cameras, both still and video. People with recorders and microphones. People who were just plain going out of their minds with excitement. Even with the limo’s doors and windows closed I could hear them. This was no Hollywood dream, after all. It was a nightmare straight out of a horror film, and the people reminded me of the villagers swarming around the mill right before they burned Dr. Frankenstein’s monster to death.

  Panicked, I grabbed Ricky’s arm.

  “Red, it’s okay. They can’t get to you. And see who’s right there? Hy and the bodyguards. Nothing’s going to happen to me, I promise.”

  “What was the title of your last album?”

  “Huh? Oh, no, neither of us is living in the broken promise land anymore.” He put his arms around me till the car stopped at the curb. “Look,” he added, “I’ll call you at Shar’s in three hours, exactly. I’ll even talk sexy on the phone, if that’ll make you feel better.”

  “Just tell me you’re safe. That’ll be more than enough.”

  “That’s what you’ll hear. You have a good flight; a driver’ll meet you, take you to Shar’s house. And don’t forget—any problem at all, you call Dan Kessell.”

  I nodded, and then one of the guards opened the door. Ricky kissed me and got out.

  The crowd noise was deafening. Most people were just screaming mindlessly, but others—reporters—pressed forward and shouted questions in voices that grated on my already raw nerves. I shrank back into a corner of the seat as Ricky straightened and held up his hands like he would on stage. They quieted down a little.

  A woman’s voice called, “What about this radio blackout of your single, Ricky?”

  He reeled off the prepared publicity spiel that he’d rehearsed for me in our hotel room that afternoon: “… cost-cutting decision on the part of my former label… very disappointing… a shame the fans can’t get to hear the music before they put down good money for the album… maybe you could ask your readers to phone in requests to the stations…”

  “Is it true you and your wife are divorcing?”

  “Yes, it’s true, but it’s an amicable split. Charly and I care very much about each other and our children, and we’re doing everything we can to make sure we’ll all be okay.”

  “Mr. Savage—what’s this about you and a redhead?”

  “Yeah, Ricky, where’s your new lady?”

  I cringed, wishing I could curl up into a little ball and roll under the seat. Or maybe become invisible, even though his body was blocking their view of me, and nobody could see through the tinted glass. Why did they think that Ricky was their property just because he gave of himself on stage? Why did they have to pry? What we had was so new, so private…

  He was silent. The questions went on, more of the same. The voices grew insistent. Finally he turned, ducked down, and looked questioningly at me.

  I couldn’t. I just couldn’t! Or could I? For his sake?

  I took a deep breath and nodded.

  He grasped my hand, helped me out of the car. Braced me, arm around my shoulders. The lights were blinding; I couldn’t make out anything or anybody. I shaded my eyes with my hand and tried not to look as terrified as I felt.

  Ricky said, “Here she is. Can you blame me for falling hard?”

  People clapped. Some whistled. Reporters began shouting questions again. My heart was racing like a small frightened creature scrambling for its burrow. I heard Ricky say good-naturedly, “No comment… I don’t think I’ll touch that one…” Then he laughed. “Come on, guys, give me a break!”

  I looked up at him and our eyes met. He squeezed my shoulders and smiled his wonderful crooked smile. And then he said softly so nobody else could hear, “I love you, Red.”

  And all of a sudden everything shifted and I was back in the limo with no recollection of how I got there. He was saying, “Three hours, I’ll call you. Promise.” And by the time I’d fully got my wits together, the car was on a freeway and all I could see were the tops of palm trees backlit by a pinkish-gray sky, even though it was the middle of the night.

  The driver said, “We’ll be at LAX in thirty minutes, Ms. Kelleher.”

  “Thanks.” I realized I was crying and reached into my purse for a Kleenex. There wasn’t one, of course, but my fingers found the fax that had come for Shar after she left the hotel—the fax Mick had handed me backstage and asked me to give to Ricky to pass on to her.

  Damn! I was so besotted by love that I’d fallen down on the job.

  Love.

  Ricky had said the L-word. He’d given me the one thing that he knew I needed to get through the bad, scary time ahead.

  On Friday night when we swapped life stories, I’d told him about my parents dying in the car wreck when I was only eight—drunk, as they’d been for most of my young life. About my grandmother who had raised me and made no bones about me being a pain-in-the-ass obligation, approximating one of the trials of Job. About how when she died during my freshman year of college I hadn’t mourned her for a minute. About how that made me sadder than if I had.

  But those were only facts. As the night went on, I’d found myself opening up to him as I never had to anybody. And I’d finally told him about the empty place inside of me.

  It was the kind of place that starts out as a bubble in a little girl who knows she’s not loved, and gradually expands into a huge vacuum that threatens to turn her inside out and swallow her whole. From the time I was fifteen, my defense against being eaten alive by my own emptiness was to offer myself up, body and soul, to any male I thought might conceivably be lured into loving me. Young Rae Kelleher was God’s gift to half the adolescent- and some of the adult-male population of Santa Maria, California, and later to a goodly portion of the student body of UC Berkeley. But easy, superficial affairs and one-night stands are no way to fill a serious, deep, long-term chasm.

  And then in my junior year I had a pregnancy scare and realized—with shock and shame—that the father could be any one of three men. Worse luck, it coincided with my meeting Doug Grayson, the first man I’d ever come across who didn’t sense my need and immediately take advantage of it. Instead, Doug took me to dinner, to the movies, didn’t try to touch me for weeks. And I was so damned grateful that, with the misguided idea that he could somehow save me from myself, I married him.

  I’ve never been too swift on the uptake where interpersonal relationships are concerned, so it was five years before I figured out that Doug hadn’t even noticed my neediness because he was more needy yet. Truth was, I’d married a child who was so self-centered that he faked a suicide attempt when my job at All Souls—which was all that stood between us and starvation—conflicted with his demands for my attention.

  After my divorce, the empty place took on a cancerous growth rate. What few relationships I had were brief, stormy, and about as deep as a desert stream in July. Finally I stopped trying to fill the void and just let it have its way with me, figuring it would eventually consume me, and so what?

  Funny, though: I’d given up, and then there was Ricky. Ricky, who understood because he harbored a similar empty place. And over the past few days both of us had noticed that we felt less hollow. He didn’t wake up in the middle of the night and wonder, What’s missing in me? I didn’t look at Shar and Hy and wonder, What makes them worthy of love, when I’m not?

  And the strangest thing of all was that song—“The Empty Place.” A song about the two of us that he’d written a full year before.

  I stared out the windows of the limo at the palm trees and the odd, pale night sky, tears sliding down my cheeks. The empty place was still there. It would always live inside me, just as Ricky’s would always live inside him. But if he survived this terrible time ahead, eventually both of our life-threatening vacuums would again be reduced to bubbles.

  And, I thought, if anything happens to him, that vacuum’ll suck me in and destroy me, and I won’t even care.

  Finally I told my
self I had to stop crying. Like Ricky said of himself when he cried, I wasn’t a pretty sight. I sat up straighter and wiped my eyes on the hem of my tee. Totally ridiculous—I was riding in a limo, and I couldn’t lay hand to a Kleenex!

  I reached into my purse to see if maybe there was a dirty one lurking at its bottom. My fingers touched Shar’s fax. Reading material. Something to help me through till we got to the airport. I pulled it out, fumbled for a light switch. It was from Jenny Gordon, the investigator in Austin…

  “Ms. Kelleher? Your charter flight’s ready and we’ll be at LAX in two minutes. I’ll stay with you till you’re safely on board.”

  “Cancel the flight,” I told the driver. “I want to go back to the Century Plaza.”

  “But Mr. Savage said—”

  “Well, Mr. Savage isn’t here now, is he?”

  “… No, ma’am.”

  “Then please take me back to the hotel—as fast as possible.”

  PART THREE

  July 27, 1995

  AMTRAK WELCOMES THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO NOWHERE TOUR!

  BLACKED OUT IN LOS ANGELES: THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO NOWHERE

  RADIO KZLA TURNS ON THE LIGHTS: MIDNIGHT TRAIN A HOTSHOT DEBUT!

  SOON THE WORLD WILL KNOW WHAT YOU’VE DONE!!!

  Twenty-two

  12:01 A.M., Pacific Daylight Time

  Even though I was running to make the train, the last banner stretching across Union Station’s great arching main concourse slowed me down. Like the others, it hung between two enormous Art Deco chandeliers that looked like flying saucers hovering some thirty feet above the marble floor. But unlike those supplied by Amtrak, Zenith’s publicity department, and the FM country station that apparently had ended the blackout, its message was hostile—and unpleasantly familiar.

  “Oh, my God,” I muttered.

  The crowd had dwindled by the time I arrived; only diehard fans and a few stranded travelers remained in the cavernous echoing station. Maintenance people moved around, sweeping up the detritus that any gathering of more than five seems to leave behind. I spotted a security guard leaning on one of the massive old-fashioned leather chairs in the waiting area and hurried up to him. “That banner,” I said, pointing, “do you know who supplied it?”