When the Bough Breaks (4 page)

I went out on the patio and looked up at the sky until luminescent discs danced in front of my eyes. My skin itched. Bird songs irritated me. I couldn’t sit still.

It went on that way the entire afternoon. Miserable.

At four-thirty he called.

“Dr. Delaware? This is Milo Sturgis. Detective Sturgis.”

“What can I do for you, Detective?”

“How are you feeling?”

“Much better, thank you.”

“That’s good.”

There was silence.

“Uh, Doctor, I’m kind of on shaky ground here …”

“What’s on your mind?”

“You know, I was in the Medical Corps in Viet Nam. We used to see a lot of something called acute stress reaction. I was wondering if …”

“You think that’s what I’ve got?”

“Well …”

“What was the prescribed treatment in Viet Nam?”

“We got them back into action as quickly as possible. The more they avoided combat the worse they got.”

“Do you think that’s what I should do? Jump back into the swing of things?”

“I can’t say, Doctor. I’m no psychologist.”

“You’ll diagnose but you won’t treat.”

“Okay, Doctor. Just wanted to see if—”

“No. Wait. I’m sorry. I appreciate your calling.” I was confused, wondering what ulterior motive he could possibly have.

“Yeah, sure. No problem.”

“Thanks, really. You’d make a hell of a shrink, Detective.”

He laughed.

“That’s sometimes part of the job, sir.”

After he hung up I felt better than I’d felt in days. The next morning I called him at the West L.A. Division headquarters and offered to buy him a drink.

We met at Angela’s, across from the West L.A. station on Santa
Monica Boulevard. It was a coffee shop with a smoky cocktail lounge in the back populated by several groupings of large, solemn men. I noticed that few of them acknowledged Milo, which seemed unusual. I had always thought cops did a lot of backslapping and good-natured cussing after hours. These men took their drinking seriously. And quietly.

He had great potential as a therapist. He sipped Chivas, sat back, and let me talk. No more interrogation now. He listened and I spilled my guts.

By the end of the evening, though, he was talking too.

Over the next couple of weeks Milo and I found out that we had a lot in common. We were about the same age—he was ten months older—and had been born into working-class families in medium-sized towns. His father had been a steelworker, mine an electrical assembler. He too had been a good student, graduating with honors from Purdue and with an M.A. in literature from Indiana U., Bloomington. He’d planned to be a teacher when he was drafted. Two years in Viet Nam had somehow turned him into a policeman.

Not that he considered his job at odds with his intellectual pursuits. Homicide detectives, he informed me, were the intellectuals of any police department. Investigating murder requires little physical activity and lots of brainwork. Veteran homicide men sometimes violate regulations and don’t carry a weapon. Just lots of pens and pencils. Milo packed his .38 but confessed that he really didn’t need it.

“It’s very white collar, Alex, with lots of paperwork, decision-making, attention to detail.”

He liked being a cop, enjoyed catching bad guys. Sometimes he thought he might like to try something else, but exactly what that something else was, wasn’t clear.

We had other interests in common. We’d both done some martial arts training. Milo had taken a mixed bag of self-defense courses while in the army. I’d learned fencing and karate while in graduate school. We were miserably out of shape but deluded ourselves that it would all come back if we needed it. Both of us appreciated good food, good music and the virtues of solitude.

The rapport between us developed quickly.

About three weeks after we’d known each other he told me he was homosexual. I was taken by surprise and had nothing to say.

“I’m telling you now because I don’t want you to think I’ve been trying to put the make on you.”

Suddenly I was ashamed, because that had been my initial thought, exactly.

It was hard to accept, at first, his being gay, despite all my supposed
psychological sophistication. I know all the facts. That
they
make up 5 to 10 percent of virtually any human grouping. That most of
them
look just like me and you. That
they
could be anybody—the butcher, the baker, the local homicide dick. That most of
them
are reasonably well-adjusted.

And yet the stereotypes adhere to the brain. You expect them to be mincing, screaming, nelly fairies; leather-armored shaven-skull demons; oh-so-preppy mustachioed young things in Izod shirts and khaki trousers; or hiking-booted bulldykes.

Milo didn’t look homosexual.

But he was and had been comfortable with it for several years. He wasn’t in the closet, neither did he flaunt it.

I asked him if the department knew about it.

“Uh-huh. Not in the sense of filing an official report. It’s just something that’s known.”

“How do they treat you?”

“Disapproval from a distance—cold looks. But basically it’s live and let live. They’re short-staffed and I’m good. What do they want? To drag in the ACLU and lose a good detective in the bargain? Ed Davis was a homophobe. He’s gone and it’s not so bad.”

“What about the other detectives?”

He shrugged.

“They leave me alone. We talk business. We don’t double-date.”

Now the lack of recognition by the men at Angela’s made sense.

Some of Milo’s initial altruism, his reaching out to help me, was a little more understandable, too. He knew what it was like to be alone. A gay cop was a person in limbo. You could never be one of the gang back at the station, no matter how well you did your job. And the homosexual community was bound to be suspicious of someone who looked, acted like and
was
a cop.

“I figured I should tell you, since we seem to be getting friendly.”

“It’s no big deal, Milo.”

“No?”

“No.” I wasn’t really all that comfortable with it. But I was damn well going to work on it.

A month after Stuart Hickle stuck a .22 in his mouth and blasted his brains all over my wallpaper, I made some major changes in my life.

I resigned my job at Western Pediatric and closed down my practice. I referred all my patients to a former student, a first rate therapist who was starting out in practice and needed the business. I had taken very few new referrals since starting the groups for the Kim’s Korner families,
so there was less separation anxiety than would normally be expected.

I sold an apartment building in Malibu, forty units that I’d purchased seven years before, for a large profit. I also let go of a duplex in Santa Monica. Part of the money—the portion that would eventually go to taxes—I put in a high-yield money market. The rest went into tax-free municipals. It wasn’t the kind of investing that would make me richer, but it would provide financial stability. I figured I could live off the interest for two or three years as long as I didn’t get too extravagant.

I sold my old Chevy Two and bought a Seville, a seventy-nine, the last year they looked good. It was forest-green with a saddle-colored leather interior that was cushy and quiet. With the amount of driving I’d be doing, the lousy mileage wouldn’t make much difference. I threw away most of my old clothes and got new stuff—mostly soft fabrics—knits, cords, rubber-soled shoes, cashmere sweaters, robes, shorts, and pullovers.

I had the pipes cleaned out on the hot tub that I’d never used since I bought the house. I started to buy food and drink milk. I pulled my old Martin out of its case and strummed it on the balcony. I listened to records. I read for pleasure for the first time since high school. I got a tan. I shaved off my beard and discovered I had a face, and not a bad one at that.

I dated good women. I met Robin and things really started to get better.

Be-kind-to-Alex time. Early retirement six months before my thirty-third birthday.

It was fun while it lasted.

3

M
ORTON
H
ANDLER’S
last residence—if you didn’t count the morgue—had been a luxury apartment complex off Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. It had been built into a hillside and designed to give a honeycomb effect: a loosely connected chain of individual units linked by corridors that had been placed at seemingly random locations, the apartments staggered to give each one a full view of the ocean. The motif was bastard Spanish: blindingly white textured stucco walls, red tile roofs, window accents of black wrought iron. Plantings of azalea and hibiscus filled in occasional patches of earth. There were lots of potted plants sunk in large terra-cotta containers: coconut palms, rubber plants, sun ferns, temporary-looking, as if someone planned on moving them all out in the middle of the night.

Handler’s unit was on an intermediate level. The front door was sealed, with an L.A.P.D. sticker taped across it. Lots of footprints dirtied the terrazzo walkway near the entrance.

Milo led me across a terrace filled with polished stones and succulents to a unit eater-cornered from the murder scene. Adhesive letters spelling out the word MAN GER were affixed to the door. Bad jokes about Baby Jesus flashed through my mind.

Milo knocked.

I realized then that the place was amazingly silent. There must have been at least fifty units but there wasn’t a soul in sight. No evidence of human habitation.

We waited a few minutes. He raised his fist to knock again just before the door opened.

“Sorry. I was washin’ my hair.”

The woman could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty. She had pale skin with the kind of texture that looked as if a pinch
would crumble it. Large brown eyes topped by plucked brows. Thin lips. A slight underbite. Her hair was wrapped in an orange towel and the little that peeked out was medium brown. She wore a faded cotton shirt of ochre-and-orange print over rust-colored stretch pants. Dark blue tennis shoes on her feet. Her eyes darted from Milo to me. She looked like someone who’d been knocked around plenty and refused to believe that it wasn’t going to happen again at any moment.

“Mrs. Quinn? This is Dr. Alex Delaware. He’s the psychologist I told you about.”

“Please to meet you, Doctor.”

Her hand was thin and cold and moist and she pulled away as quickly as she could.

“Melody’s watchin’ TV in her room. Out of school, with all that’s been goin’ on. I let her watch to keep her mind off it.”

We followed her into the apartment.

Apartment was a charitable word. What it was, really, was a couple of oversized closets stuck together. An architect’s postscript. Hey, Ed, we’ve got an extra four hundred square feet of corner in back of terrace number 142. Why don’t we throw a roof over it, nail up some drywall and call it a manager’s unit? Get some poor soul to do scutwork for the privilege of living in Pacific Palisades …

The living room was filled with one floral sofa, a masonite end table and a television. A framed painting of Mount Rainier that looked as if it came from a Savings and Loan calendar and a few yellowed photographs hung on the wall. The photos were of hardened, unhappy-looking people and appeared to date from the Gold Rush.

“My grandparents,” she said.

A cubicle of a kitchen was visible and from it came the smell of frying bacon. A large bag of sour-cream-and-onion-flavored potato chips and a six pack of Dr Pepper sat on the counter.

“Very nice.”

“They came here in 1902. From Oklahoma.” She made it sound like an apology.

There was an unfinished wooden door and from behind it came the sound of sudden laughter and applause, bells and buzzers. A game show.

“She’s watchin’ back there.”

“That’s just fine, Mrs. Quinn. We’ll let her be until we’re ready for her.”

The woman nodded her head in assent.

“She don’t get much chance to watch the daytime shows, bein’ in school. So she’s watchin’ ’em now.”

“May we sit down, ma’am?”

“Oh yes, yes.” She flitted around the room like a mayfly, tugging
at the towel on her head. She brought in an ashtray and set it down on the end table. Milo and I sat on the sofa and she dragged in a tubular aluminum-and-Naugahyde chair from the kitchen for herself. Despite the fact that she was thin her haunches settled and spread. She took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one up and sucked in the smoke until her cheeks hollowed. Milo spoke.

“How old is your daughter, Mrs. Quinn?”

“Bonita. Call me Bonita. Melody’s the girl. She’s just seven this past month.” Talking about her daughter seemed to make her especially nervous. She inhaled greedily on her cigarette and blew little smoke out. Her free hand clenched and unclenched in rapid cadence.

“Melody may be our only witness to what happened here last night.” Milo looked at me with a disgusted frown.

I knew what he was thinking. An apartment complex with seventy to one hundred residents and the only possible witness a child.

“I’m scared for her, Detective Sturgis, if someone else finds out.” Bonita Quinn stared at the floor as if doing it long enough would reveal the mystic secret of the Orient.

“I assure you, Mrs. Quinn, that no one will find out. Dr. Delaware has served as a special consultant to the police many times.” He lied shamelessly and glibly. “He understands the importance of keeping things secret. Besides—” he reached over to pat her shoulder reassuringly. I thought she’d go through the ceiling “—all psychologists demand confidentiality when working with their patients. Isn’t that so, Dr. Delaware?”

“Absolutely.” We wouldn’t get into the whole muddy issue of children’s rights to privacy.

Bonita Quinn made a strange, squeaking noise that was impossible to interpret. The closest thing to it that I could remember was the noise laboratory frogs used to make in Physiological Psych right before we pithed them by plunging a needle down into the tops of their skulls.

“What’s all this hypnotism gonna do to her?”

I lapsed into my shrink’s voice—the calm, soothing tones that had become so natural over the years that they switched on automatically. I explained to her that hypnosis wasn’t magic, simply a combination of focused concentration and deep relaxation, that people tended to remember things more clearly when they were relaxed and that was why the police used it for witnesses. That children were better at going into hypnosis than were adults because they were less inhibited and enjoyed fantasy. That it didn’t hurt, and was actually pleasant for most youngsters and that you couldn’t get stuck in it or do anything against your will while hypnotized.