Kiss the Girls

Rudolph as he crossed the hospital lot. His stride was long and quick and buoyant. Nothing bothering him today. Finally, he disappeared inside a gray metal side door of the hospital.
    “A
doctor,
” Kate said and shook her head back and forth. “This is so weird, Alex. I’m shaking on the
inside.
”
    The static on the car radio startled us, but we could hear agent John Asaro’s deep, raspy voice.
    “Alex, did you guys see him? Get a good look? What does Ms. McTiernan think? What’s the verdict on our Dr. Squirrel?”
    I looked across the front seat at Kate. She looked all of her thirty-one years right now. Not quite so confident and assured, a little gray around the gills. The prime witness. She understood the deadly seriousness of the moment perfectly.
    “I don’t think he’s Casanova,” Kate finally said. She shook her head. “He’s not the same physical type. He’s thinner…
carries
himself differently. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I don’t think it’s him, goddammit.” She sounded a little disappointed.
    Kate continued to shake her head. “I’m almost sure he isn’t Casanova, Alex. There must be two of them. Two Mr. Squirrels.” Her brown eyes were intense, as she looked at me.
    So there
were
two of them. Were they competing? What the hell was their coast-to-coast game all about?

Chapter 64

    S MALL TALK, surveillance talk; it was familiar territory for me. Sampson and I had a saying about surveillance back in D.C.:
They
do the crime;
we
do the time.
    “How much could he make with a successful Beverly Hills medical practice? Ballpark number, Kate,” I asked my partner. We were still watching the doctors’ private parking lot of Cedars-Sinai. There was nothing to do but eyeball Rudolph’s spiffy new BMW and wait, and talk like old friends on a front stoop in D.C.
    “He probably charges about a hundred and fifty to two a visit. He could gross five or six hundred thousand a year. Then there are surgery fees, Alex. That’s if he has a conscience about the prices he charges, and we
know
he doesn’t have a conscience.”
    I shook my head in disbelief as I rubbed my palm over my chin. “I have to get back into private practice. Baby needs new shoes.”
    Kate smiled. “You miss them, don’t you, Alex? You talk about your kids a lot. Damon and Jannie. Poolball-head and Velcro.”
    I smiled back. Kate knew my nicknames for the kids by now. “Yeah, I do. They’re my babies, my little pals.”
    Kate laughed some more. I liked to make her laugh. I thought of the bittersweet stories she’d told me about her sisters, especially her twin, Kristin. Laughter is good medicine.
    The black BMW coupe just sat there, shining brightly and expensively in the California sunlight.
Surveillance sucks,
I thought,
no matter where you have to do it. Even in sunny L.A.
    Kyle Craig had gotten me a lot of rope here in Los Angeles. Certainly much more than I’d had in the South. He’d gotten rope for Kate, too. There was something in it for him, though. The old quid pro quo. Kyle wanted me to interview the Gentleman Caller once he was caught, and he expected me to report everything to him. I suspected that Kyle himself hoped to bag Casanova.
    “Do you really think the two of them are competing?” Kate asked me after a while.
    “It makes psychological sense out of some things for me,” I told her. “They might feel a need to ‘one up’ each other. The Gentleman’s diaries could be his way of saying: See, I’m better than you. I’m more famous. Anyway, I haven’t decided yet. Sharing their exploits is probably more for thrill purposes than intimacy, though. They
both
like to get turned on.”
    Kate stared into my eyes. “Alex, doesn’t it make you feel creepy as hell trying to figure this out?”
    I smiled. “That’s why I want to catch Butt-Head and Beavis. So the creepiness will finally stop.”
    Kate and I waited at the hospital until Rudolph finally reappeared. It was nearly two in the afternoon. He drove straight to his office on North Bedford, west of Rodeo Drive. Rudolph saw patients there. Mostly women patients. Dr. Rudolph was a plastic surgeon. As such, he could
create
and
sculpt.
Women
depended
on him. And… his patients all
chose
him.
    We followed Rudolph home at around seven. Five or six hundred thousand a year, I was thinking. It was more than I could make in a decade. Was it the money he needed to be the Gentleman Caller? Was Casanova wealthy, too? Was he a doctor also?