When the Bough Breaks (13 page)

“Eight, Roy Longstreth, pharmacist for Thrifty’s Drug chain, Beverly Hills branch. Another one. And—last but not least—Gerard Paul Mendenhall, Corporal, United States Army, Tyler, Texas, presence verified.”

Beverly Hills was closer than either Northride or Burbank, so we headed for Thrifty’s. The Beverly Hills branch turned out to be a brick-and-glass cube on Canon Drive just north of Wilshire. It shared a block with trendy boutiques and a Häagen Dazs ice-cream parlor.

Milo showed his badge surreptitiously to the girl behind the liquor counter and got the manager, a light-skinned middle-aged black, in seconds flat. The manager got nervous and wanted to know if Longstreth had done anything wrong. In classic cop style, Milo hedged.

“We just want to ask him a few questions.”

I had trouble keeping a straight face through that one, but the cliché seemed to satisfy the manager.

“He’s not here now. He comes on at two-thirty, works the night shift.”

“We’ll be back. Please don’t tell him we were here.”

Milo gave him his card. When we left he was studying it like a map to buried treasure.

The ride to Northridge was a half-hour cruise on the Ventura Freeway West. When we got to the Cal State campus, we headed straight for the registrar’s office. Milo obtained a copy of Michael Penn’s class schedule. Armed with that and his mug shot, we located him in twenty minutes, walking across a wide, grassy triangle accompanied by a girl.

“Mr. Penn?”

“Yes?” He was a good-looking fellow, medium height, with broad shoulders and long legs. His light brown hair was cut preppy short. He wore a light blue Izod shirt and blue jeans, penny loafers with no socks. I knew from his file that he was twenty-six but he looked five years younger. He had a pleasant, unlined face, a real All-American type. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d try to run someone down with a Pontiac Firebird.

“Police.” Again, the badge. “We’d like to talk to you for a few moments.”

“What about?” The hazel eyes narrowed and the mouth got tight.

“We’d prefer to talk to you in private.”

Penn looked at the girl. She was young, no more than nineteen, short, dark, with a Dorothy Hamill wedge cut.

“Give me a minute, Julie.” He chucked her under the chin.

“Mike …?”

“Just a minute.”

We left her standing there and walked to a concrete area furnished with stone tables and benches. Students moved by as if on a treadmill.
There was little standing around. This was a commuter campus. Many of the students worked part-time jobs and squeezed classes in during their spare time. It was a good place to get your B.A. in computer science or business, a teaching credential or a master’s in accounting. If you wanted fun or leisurely intellectual debates in the shade of an ivy-encrusted oak, forget it.

Michael Penn looked furious but he was working hard at concealing it.

“What do you want?”

“When’s the last time you saw Dr. Morton Handler?”

Penn threw back his head and laughed. It was a disturbingly hollow sound.

“That asshole? I read about his death. No loss.”

“When did you see him last?”

Penn was smirking now.

“Years ago,
officer
.” He made the title sound like an insult. “When I was in
therapy
.”

“I take it you didn’t think much of him.”

“Handler? He was a shrink.” As if that explained it.

“You don’t think much of psychiatrists.”

Penn held out his hands, palms up.

“Hey listen. That whole thing was a big mistake. I lost control of my car and some paranoid idiot claimed I tried to kill him with it. They busted me, railroaded me and then they offered me probation if I saw a shrink. Gave me all those garbage tests.”

Those garbage tests included the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and a handful of projectives. Though far from perfect, they were reliable enough when it came to someone like Penn. I had read his MMPI profile and psychopathy oozed from every index.

“You didn’t like Dr. Handler?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth.” Penn lowered his voice. He moved his eyes back and forth, restless, jumpy. Behind the handsome face was something dark and dangerous. Handler hadn’t misdiagnosed this one.

“You did like him.” Milo played with him like a gaffed stingray.

“I didn’t like him or dislike him. I had no use for him. I’m not crazy. And I didn’t kill him.”

“You can account for your whereabouts the night he was murdered?”

“When was that?”

Milo gave him the date and time.

Penn cracked his knuckles and looked through us as if zeroing in on a distant target.

“Sure. That entire night I was with my girl.”

“Julie?”

Penn laughed.

“Her? No. I’ve got a mature woman, officer. A woman of means.” His brow creased and his expression changed from smug to sour. “You’re going to have to talk to her, aren’t you?”

Milo nodded his head.

“That’ll screw things up for me.”

“Gee, Mike, that’s really too bad.”

Penn threw him a hateful look, then changed it to bland innocence. He could play his face like a deck of cards, shuffling, palming from the bottom, coming up with a new number every second.

“Listen, officer, that whole incident is behind me. I’m holding down a job, going to school—I’m getting my degree in six months. I don’t want to get messed up because my name’s in Handler’s files.”

He sounded like Wally on “Leave It to Beaver”—all earnest innocence. Gosh, Beave …

“We’ll have to verify your alibi, Mike.”

“Okay, okay, do it. Just don’t tell her too much, okay? Keep it general.”

Keep it general so I can fabricate something. You could see the gears spinning behind the high, tan forehead.

“Sure, Mike.” Milo took his pencil out and tapped it on his lips.

“Sonya Magary. She owns the Puff ’n’ Stuff Children’s Boutique in the Plaza de Oro in Encino.”

“Have you got the number handy?” Milo asked pleasantly.

Penn clenched his jaws and gave it to him.

“We’ll call her, Mike. Don’t you call her first, okay? We treasure spontaneity.” Milo put away his pencil and closed his notepad. “Have a nice day, now.”

Penn looked from me to Milo, then back to me, as if seeking an ally. Then he got up and walked away in long, muscular strides.

“Oh, Mike!” Milo called.

Penn turned around.

“What are you getting your degree in?”

“Marketing.”

As we left the campus we could see him walking with Julie. Her head was on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. He was smiling down on her and talking very fast.

“What do you think?” Milo asked as he settled behind the wheel.

“I think he’s innocent as far as this case goes, but I’ll bet you he’s got some kind of dirty deal going on. He was really relieved when he found out what we were there for.”

Milo nodded.

“I agree. But what the hell—that’s someone else’s headache.”

We got back on the freeway, heading east. We exited in Sherman Oaks, found a little French place on Ventura near Woodman and had lunch. Milo used the pay phone to call Sonya Magary. He came back to the table, shaking his head.

“She loves him. ’That dear boy, that sweet boy, I hope he’s not in trouble.’” He imitated a thick Hungarian accent. “She verifies he was with her on the fateful night. Sounds proud of it. I expected her to tell me about their sex life—in Technicolor.”

He shook his head and buried his face in a plate of steamed mussels.

We caught up with Roy Longstreth as he got out of his Toyota in the Thrifty’s parking lot. He was short and frail-looking, with watery blue eyes and an undernourished chin. Prematurely bald, what little hair he did have was on the sides; he had left it long, hanging down over his ears, so that the general effect was of a friar who’d been meditating too long and had neglected his personal grooming. A mousy brown mustache snuck across his upper lip. He had none of Penn’s bravado but there was that same jumpiness in the eyes.

“Yes, what do you want?” He piped up in a squeaky voice after Milo gave him the badge routine. He looked at his watch.

When Milo told him, he looked as if he were going to cry. Uncharacteristic anxiety for a supposed psychopath. Unless the whole thing was an act. You never knew the tricks those types could come up with when they had to.

“When I read about it I just knew you’d come after me.” The insignificant mustache trembled like a twig in a storm.

“Why’s that, Roy?”

“Because of the things he said about me. He told my mother I was a psychopath. Told her not to trust me. I’m probably on some whacko list, right?”

“Can you account for your whereabouts the night he was killed?”

“Yes. That’s the first thing I thought of when I read about it—they’re going to come and ask me questions about it. I made sure I knew. I even wrote it down. Wrote a note to myself. Roy, you were at church that night. So when they come and ask you, you’ll know where you were—”

He could have gone on that way for a couple of days but Milo cut him off.

“Church? You’re a religious man, Roy?”

Longstreth gave a laugh that was choked with panic.

“No, no. Not praying. The Westside Singles group at Bel Air Presbyterian—it’s the same place Ronald Reagan used to go to.”

“The singles group?”

“No, no, no. The church. He used to worship there before he was elected and—”

“Okay, Ron. You were at the Westside Singles group from when to when?”

The sight of Milo taking notes made him even more nervous. He began bouncing up and down, a marionette at the hands of a palsied puppeteer.

“From nine to one-thirty—I stayed to the end. I helped clean up. I can tell you what they served. It was guacamole and nachos and there was Gallo jug wine and shrimp dip and—”

“Of course there’ll be lots of people who saw you there.”

“Sure,” he said, then stopped. “I—I didn’t really mingle much. I helped out, tending bar. I saw lots of people but I don’t know if any of them will—remember me.” His voice had quieted to a whisper.

“That could be a problem, Roy.”

“Unless—no—yes—Mrs. Heatherington. She’s an older woman. She volunteers at church functions. She was cleaning up, too. And serving. I spent a lot of time talking to her—I can even tell you what we talked about, It was about collectables—she collects Norman Rockwells and I collect Icarts.”

“Icarts?”

“You know, the Art Deco prints.”

The works of Louis Icart went for high prices these days. I wondered how a pharmacist could afford them.

“Mother gave me one when I was sixteen and they—” he searched for the right word—“captivated me. She gives them to me on my birthday and I pick up a few myself. Dr. Handler collected them, too, you know. That—” he let his words trail off.

“Oh, really? Did he show you his collection?”

Longstreth shook his head energetically.

“No. He had one in his office. I noticed it and we started talking. But he used it against me later on.”

“How’s that?”

“After the evaluation—you know I was sent to him by the court after I was caught—” he looked nervously at the Thrifty’s building—“shoplifting.” Tears filled his eyes. “For God’s sake, I took a tube of rubber cement at Sears and they caught me! I thought Mother would die from the shame. And I worried the School of Pharmacy would find out—it was horrible!”

“How did he use the fact that you collected Icarts against you?” asked Milo patiently.

“He kind of implied, never came out and said it, but phrased it so
you knew what he meant but he couldn’t be pinned down.”

“Implied what, Roy?”

“That he could be bought off. That if I bribed him with an Icart or two—he even mentioned the ones he liked—he would write a favorable report.”

“Did you?”

“What? Bribe him? Not on your life. That would be dishonest!”

“And did he press the issue?”

Longstreth picked at his fingernails.

“Like I said, not so you could pin him down. He just said that I was a borderline case—psychopathic personality, or something less stigmatizing—anxiety reaction or something like that—that I could go either way. In the end he told Mother I was a psychopath.”

The wan face screwed up with rage.

“I’m glad he’s dead! There, I’ve said it! It’s what I thought the first time I read about it in the paper.”

“But you didn’t do it.”

“Of course not. I couldn’t. I run from evil, I don’t embrace it!”

“We’ll talk to Mrs. Heatherington, Roy.”

“Yes. Ask her about the nachos and the wine—I believe it was Gallo Hearty Burgundy. And there was fruit punch with slices of orange floating in it, too. In a cut glass bowl. And one of the women got sick on the floor at the end. I helped mop it up—”

“Thanks, Roy. You can go now.”

“Yes. I will.”

He turned around like a robot, a thin figure in a short blue druggist’s smock, and walked into Thrifty’s.

“He’s dispensing drugs?” I asked, incredulous.

“If he’s not in some whacko file he should be.” Milo pocketed his notepad and we walked to the car. “He look like a psychopath to you?”

“Not unless he’s the best actor on the face of the earth. Schizoid, withdrawn. Pre-schizophrenic, if anything.”

“Dangerous?”

“Who knows? Put him up against enough stress and he might blow. But I’d judge him more likely to go the hermit route—curl up in bed, play with himself, wither, stay that way for a decade or two while Mommy propped his pillows.”

“If that story about the Icarts is true it sheds some light on our beloved victim.”

“Handler? A real Dr. Schweitzer.”

“Yeah.” said Milo. “The kind of guy someone might want dead.”

* * *

We got on Coldwater Canyon before it clogged with the cars of commuters returning to their homes in the Valley, and made it to Burbank by half past four.

Presto Instant Print was one of scores of gray concrete edifices that filled the industrial park near the Burbank airport like so many oversized tombstones. The air smelled toxic and the flatulent roar of jets shattered the sky at regular intervals. I wondered about the life expectancy of those who spent their daylight hours here.