Mortal Danger

another dentist friend, this one in Florida: Now, it was Dr. Stanley Szabo, whom he called his mentor. Szabo may well have been one of the first to teach John body chemistry and nutrition.
    John Williams confided in Nozawa—or at least Randall thought he did. John had created a whole new background, and he was convincing at first as he spoke of his earlier years. Randall had gone to the University of Oregon, and John said he had, too. Randall had no reason to doubt John, who named some of the outstanding buildings on the Eugene campus and seemed very familiar with the layout of the university. John said he’d joined the Peace Corps after leaving the university.
    “He told me he was from the San Francisco Bay area,” Randall Nozawa recalled. “And that he’d worked there for thirty years in his own clinic. Eventually, he sold his nutrition business in San Francisco. I believed him for a long time, and then sometimes I wondered, because the dates and the math didn’t quite match up.”
    Of course it was a lie about any San Francisco clinic, and a lie about being in the Peace Corps, and a lie about attending the University of Oregon. John was adept at making up convincing new backgrounds for himself.
    John mentioned his ex-wife, Sue, and his daughters, but he said very little about them. “He said that he’d left his wife because he just didn’t want to be married anymore.”
    Where John had told Kate that he’d never been with any woman except for his wife and herself, he bragged to Randall Nozawa about many, many seductions, saying, “I was always finding naked women in my office at the end of the day, and I had to look around the parking lot to see if jealous husbands and boyfriends were lurking.”
    This skinny, balding man seemed anything but a love god, but John explained the simple reason women were so drawn to him. “I got to screw a lot of women,” he bragged, “because it all came down to the personal thing. I just let ’em talk. I listen, and they think you’re a great guy.”
    John sometimes spoke of a woman he’d been with for a long time. He never called her by name to Randall, but he said she was a stewardess, adding, “All stewardesses are whores.”
    He seemed ambivalent when he described her. “This was a true ‘ten.’ But then, after a night of great sex, she’s standing over me, with an expression of disdain on her face.”
    This nameless woman—who was really Kate—had, according to John, betrayed him and caused him all kinds of grief. “She was having an affair with the police chief in this town we lived in and they drummed up phony charges against me.”
    His hatred for the flight attendant was all-consuming, and he apparently blamed her for everything that was wrong with his life. Randall could understand John’s loathing if it was true that she’d been unfaithful and then conspired with the police chief. That was really rubbing his nose in it.
    John told Randall about being in a monastery for six months. Had he been hiding out from the charges trumped up by his cheating mistress and her lover? John didn’t explain just why he’d been in the monastery, or in what time frame that had occurred. But he did marvel at the wisdom and almost psychic intuition that he said some of the monks had had.
    “When I left,” John said, “one monk looked at me and said, ‘Don’t do it.’”
    “Don’t do what?” Randall asked. “What did he mean?”
    “Wow, those guys can get in your head!” John said, still not spelling it out. “He told me, ‘It’s not worth it.’”
    Randall found little mystery about what John had been contemplating—he’d wanted to kill the woman who’d betrayed him in Oregon. And somehow “the monk” had known that. If, indeed, there had been a monk. The wholescenario of the monastery might well have emerged from John Branden/Williams’s fertile imagination, no more true than his stories about San Francisco.
     
    John and Turi lived in Tacoma when they were first together. Turi’s mother, Liv Lee, had resided in a house in Seascape Hills, a retirement community in Gig Harbor, for fifteen years, but it became apparent in the early nineties that she could no longer live alone safely. Turi found an assisted-living facility in Tacoma. Together with her daughters, she helped her mother move. That left the house on Lost Beach Road in Seascape Hills vacant. It didn’t sell, and that worried Liv.
    Turi missed Gig Harbor—she had so many friends