Chapter 1

"Dr.Chivago will see you now, Mr. Kane," said the nurse with the pretty legs, pronouncing his name as Shee-vago, with a hint of European ancestry in her voice. "Please do come in." Since there was nothing interesting to read in the waiting room - deliberately, I suppose - I obliged. I have always held psychiatrists to be somewhere near as useful as a lawn-mover in winter and snowshoes in summer. Contrary to what the nurse with the pretty legs (there was really nobody else there, but how else can I tell you how pretty the legs of the nurse with the pretty legs were) had said, the good doctor was not doing me a favor by seeing me, because I had never heard of him before he called me up the previous day to fix up an appointment.

The only reason I showed up was because he said my wife was his patient. And that he had already spoken to my daughter. Two facts - assuming they were true - which I did not know until then. He wouldn't say anything more about what it was except that it related to the mental health of my wife, to which I had retorted that a specialist of his kind was hardly qualified to talk about anything else. True, she had been shopping for a good shrink for some time now, but she never told me she had found one with a nurse who had pretty legs. I figured it was some kind of a con where he could bill her a few extra hours spent asking me how many beers I had a day.

I was undecided until he told me that he had already billed her for an appointment with me the next day, and it would have to be paid whether I visited him or not. "And my nurse has pretty legs," he said, finally convincing me.

So I kept my eyes on the ground - or thereabouts, you could say - as I walked into his room, my hand accidentally brushing against the heavy bosom of the nurse with the pretty legs, until I had passed her and there was no longer a reason to look like a blushing bride. She went out, closing the door behind her, cuing Dr.Chivago to step forward and shake my hands. He gestured to a couch placed against the glass wall on the other side. It would have been a nice view of the ocean except for the few other buildings that crowded around us. I hoped the glass was thick enough, because those concrete walls right across the street were enough even to make a regular guy like me claustrophobic.

"Didn't I tell you?" he said, handing me a can. "Pretty legs."

"But the tits are fake," I told him.

He shrugged. "This is LA. Aren't they all?"

We didn't say anything for a few minutes as we sipped our beers. My opinion of the slim, bald man sitting across me went up a notch - it was good beer, just the right temperature. You can tell a lot about a man from his beer, my dad had always told me.

"Nice view," I told him. Simply because I wanted to say something.

He winced. "I bought it without seeing the place. The brochure promised a startling view of the downtown. It took me a few days to realize that they took that picture from the top of the Hollywood sign." He shook his head sadly. "These real-estate guys are pros at the con game."

I was about to tell him about pots and kettles when he smiled and stole my line. "I know, kinda like the pot calling the kettle black, right?"

Now it was my turn to shrug. "Like you said, this is LA. Everyone's got a con."

"That's an interesting point of view." He pulled out a small tape recorder from his pocket and shook it. "Do you mind if I record our conversation?"

"As long as I get to take the tape home when I leave," I told him.

That made him laugh. He left the device on the table between us without pressing the red button and held out his arms at his sides. "You want to pat me down?"

I shook my head. "You can keep your secrets. Mind if I smoke?"

"Thanks. I've got my own." We both lit up at the same time. "I don't usually offer drinks or cigarettes to my patients. That should tell you I don't see you as a patient."

"That makes us even. I don't see you as a doctor either."

He refused to get mad. "I can understand how you feel about me. You were a private investigator for what, fifteen years? You are understandably cynical about what you see around you, about a guy who calls himself a shrink and offers you beer and does not ask you to start talking the minute you step into his room. I understand -"

"You use that word a lot, don't you?" I asked him, dropping ash on the carpet as I shook my hand. "Understand."

"It is what I do, Mr. Kane. My job is not just listening, it's about understanding. It's about reading between the lines, knowing what is being said and what is being conveyed. I need to know what makes each person tick, and I have to understand everything about a person for me to do that. Because every single person who walks through those doors need me for a reason even they may not have fully understood themselves." He paused. "Do you know what I bill my patients?"

I told him.

"Yeah, that's right. A hundred dollars a week. Which means that my time with you was paid for before you even agreed to see me. And the same goes for your daughter too. And your wife can call on me at any time as long as I am free... Does this still seem like a con job to you? I do this because I care, Mr. Kane. You must have checked me out with your sources. I've got an inheritance I can live off without ever having to lift my finger, without having to take the trouble of listening to, of understanding, people with problems. People like your wife."

He took a deep breath. "Like I said, you are not here as a patient. You are here because your wife needs you to understand a lot of things she hasn't been able to tell you in person. Things that I can explain to you if you'll only allow me the slightest credibility. You need to trust me - or, at the very least, not mistrust me. It has to be Gerard Kane, the husband, who I talk to, not Gerard Kane, the retired private investigator. We can't move forward unless you want it to."

I stared at him and he stared right back with a surprising amount of defiance. There was something in his eyes that spoke the same thing that he had said, that he cared, that he wanted me to accept what he said, no matter how tenuous my acceptance was, but at least an acceptance. Not the outright dismissal of a retired PI who had seen too many things to take things at face value anymore.

I took a sip of my beer. It tasted smoky, reminding me that I had taken just a couple of puffs on my cigarette that hung its burnt ash in front like a limp... I tapped it on the potted plant next to the couch, there being no ashtray, and placed it in my mouth. It tasted a bit like beer.

I looked at him again. Dr.Chivago was busy grinding out his piece on the soil of the plant nearest to him. He caught me looking at him and grinned. "I am not really much of a smoker."

I followed his example and put out my smoke. I leaned back on his couch, getting myself comfortable. Whatever it was that he wanted to say about my wife, I was already sure I wouldn't like it. The only question was, what would I have to not like?

"Go on," I told him. "You have my full attention and a bit of my faith."

He began by mouthing a line about his not being a judge, merely a counselor. I said nothing when he waited expectantly for a smile, and the message finally got across that I was no longer interested in idle chit-chat, even if his nurse had pretty legs. He cleared his throat and asked me if I knew what the Electra complex was.

"Sure," I told him. It was an insult to my intelligence, but I let it pass. What the hell, my intelligence has been insulted more times than I can count - what's one more? "It's that Playboy chick, right? The one who's acted in a couple of movies?"

There was a strange look on his face, as if he was unsure whether I was pulling his chain. He shook his head when I said nothing more, and pulled his chair closer. "Let me get this straight," he said, all serious now. "You really don't know what the Electra complex is? A guy who's put fifteen years on the road as a detective has no idea what it is?"

I shrugged. You learn something new everyday. I made a mental note to myself that I should look it up when I got home, which I erased when the resident Dr. Freud - Dr.Chivago here, in case you were wondering - explained it to me a few seconds later. But I am getting ahead of the script here, so let me go back to my shrug after his question.

"What about the Oedipus complex?"

If this were a cartoon, a bulb would have gone off over my head. If it were a sci-fi movie, you might probably see all those currents zipping across the circuits as the AI came up with the answer. In real life, though, the only thing that happened was his sigh as I told him.

"Him I know. The guy who killed his father and married his mother, right?"

"You got it. The term Oedipus complex is used to refer to a man's infatuation with his mother, or sometimes a person in a motherly role to him. Dr. Freud - that's Sigmund Freud, I assume you've heard of him - suggested that there was a similar, shall we say, proclivity in females as well that tends to an obsession about their fathers or other father figures. Actually, the jury's still out whether he coined the phrase or not, but he was certainly the first one to give an explanation that could be accepted as science."

"You are wrong," I interrupted him.

"What?" He had that same expression on his face he had had a few minutes earlier, one of surprise and puzzlement.

"He's not alive anymore."

"Yes, he died in 1939."

"No, he didn't. That must have been her grandfather."

"Whose grandfather?"

"My wife's. Rachel's. Her father died only in 1979."

He groaned. I kid you not, the guy in front of me actually clutched his hair and groaned. I pulled out my pack of Anta-Mintz and passed it on to him. He said he didn't need it. "I was talking about Dr. Freud. He died in 1939. I know Rachel's father died in 1979, she told me herself." He took a moment to compose himself, while I used that same moment to put the mints back in my pocket. "Now, where were we?"

"You were telling me my wife was lusting after her own father..."

"Did I say that? I don't think I did. Maybe -"

"Sure you did. You said it your way, obsession or something, I said it my way."