When the Bough Breaks Read online

  Milo, meanwhile, was opening the sealed cartons with a Swiss Army knife. He took out files in dozens and made neat little piles that covered the dining-room table.

  "These are alphabetized, Alex. You can go through them and pull out the weird ones."

  He finished setting things up and he and Hardy got ready to go.

  "Del and I will be talking to bad guys off the NCIC printout."

  "We've got our work cut out for us," said Hardy. He cracked his knuckles and looked for a place to put out his cigarette, which was smoked down to the filter.

  "Toss it in the sink."

  He left to do so.

  When we were alone Milo said: "I really appreciate this, Alex. Don't drive yourself--don't try to get it all done today."

  "I'll do as many as I can before the eyes start to blur."

  "Right. We'll call you a couple of times today. To see if you've got anything we can pick up while we're on the road."

  Hardy came back straightening his tie. He was dapper in a three-piece navy worsted suit, white shirt, blood-red tie, shiny black calfskin loafers. Next to him Milo looked more shopworn than ever in his sagging trousers and lifeless tweed sport coat.

  "You ready, my man?" Hardy asked.

  "Ready."

  "Onward."

  When they were gone I put a Linda Ronstadt record on the turntable. To the accompaniment of "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," I started to consult.

  Eighty percent of the male patients in the files fell into two categories: affluent executive types referred by their internists due to a variety of stress-related symptoms--angina, impotence, abdominal pain, chronic headaches, insomnia, skin rashes of unknown origins--and depressed men of all ages. I reviewed these and put aside the remaining 20 percent for more detailed perusal.

  I knew nothing about what kind of psychiatrist Morton Handler had been when I started, but after several hours of reviewing his charts I began to build an image of him--one that was far from saintly.

  His therapy session notes were sketchy, careless, and so ambiguous as to be meaningless. It was impossible to know from reading them what he had done during those countless forty-five-minute hours. There was scant mention of treatment plans, prognoses, stress histories--anything that could be considered medically or psychologically relevant. This shoddiness was most evident in notes taken during the last five or six years of his life.

  His financial records, on the other hand, were meticulous and detailed. His fees were high, his form letters to debtors strongly worded.

  Though during the last few years he had done less talking and more prescribing, the rate at which he ordered medication wasn't unusual. Unlike Towle, he didn't appear to be a pusher. But he wasn't much of a therapist, either.

  What really bothered me was his tendency, again more common during later years, to inject snide comments into the notes. These, which he didn't even bother to couch in jargon, were nothing more than sarcastic put-downs of his patients. "Likes to alternately whimper and simper" was the description of one older man with a mood disorder. "Unlikely to be capable of anything constructive" was his pronouncement on another. "Wants therapy as camouflage for a boring, meaningless life." "A real washout." And so on.

  By late afternoon my psychological autopsy of Handler was complete. He was a burnout, one of the legions of worker ants who had grown to hate his chosen profession. He might have cared at one time--the early files were decent, if not inspired--but he hadn't by the end. Nevertheless, he had kept it up, day after day, session after session, unwilling to give up the six figure income and the perquisites of prosperity.

  I wondered how he had occupied his time as his patients poured out their inner turmoil. Did he daydream? Engage in fantasies (sexual? financial? sadistic?)? Plan the evening's dinner menu? Do mental arithmetic? Count sheep? Compute how many manic depressives could dance on the head of a pin?

  Whatever it had been, it hadn't included really listening to the human beings who sat before him believing he cared.

  It made me think of the old joke, the one about the two shrinks who meet on the elevator at the end of the day. One of them is young, a novice, and he is clearly bedraggled--tie askew, hair messed, fraught with fatigue. He turns and notices that the other, a seasoned veteran, is totally composed--tan, fit, every hair in place, a fresh carnation stuck jauntily in his lapel.

  "Doctor," beseeches the young one, "please tell me how you do it?"

  "Do what, my son?"

  "Sit, hour after hour, day after day, listening to people's problems without letting it get to you."

  "Who listens?" replies the guru.

  Funny. Unless you were shelling out ninety bucks a session to Morton Handler and getting a covert assessment as a simpering whimperer for your money.

  Had one of the subjects of his nasty prose somehow discovered the sham and murdered him? It was difficult to imagine someone engaging in the kind of butchery that had been visited upon Handler and his girlfriend in order to avenge a peeve of that kind. But you never knew. Rage was a tricky thing; sometimes it lay dormant for years, only to be triggered by a seemingly trivial stimulus. People had been ripped apart over a nudged car bumper.

  Still I found it hard to believe that the depressives and psychosomaticizers whose files I had reviewed were the stuff of which midnight skulkers were fashioned. What I really didn't want to believe was that there were two thousand potential suspects to deal with.

  It was close to five. I pulled a Coors out of the refrigerator, took it out to the balcony and lay down on a lounge, my feet propped up on the guardrail. I drank and watched the sun dip beneath the tops of the trees. Someone in the neighborhood was playing punk rock. Strangely enough it didn't seem discordant.

  At five-thirty Robin called,

  "Hi, hon. You want to come over? Key Largo's on tonight."

  "Sure," I said. "Should I pick up anything to eat?"

  She thought a moment.

  "How about chili dogs? And beer."

  "I've got a head start on the beer." Three squashed Coors empties sat on the kitchen counter.

  "Give me time to catch up, love. See you around seven."

  I hadn't heard from Milo since one-thirty. He'd called in from Bellflower, just about to interrogate a guy who'd assaulted seven women with a screwdriver. Very little similarity to the Handler case but you had to work with what you had.

  I phoned West L.A. Division and left the message for him that I'd be out for the evening.

  Then I called Bonita Quinn's number. I waited for five rings and when nobody answered, hung up.

  Humphrey and Lauren were great, as usual. The chili dogs left us belching, but satisfied. We held each other and listened to Tal Farlow and Wcs Montgomery for a while. Then I picked up one of the guitars she had lying around the studio and played for her. She listened, eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips, then gently removed my hands from the instrument and pulled me to her.

  I had planned to stay the night but at eleven I grew restless.

  "Is anything the matter, Alex?"

  "No." Just my Zeigarnik tugging at me.

  "It's the case, isn't it?"

  I said nothing.

  "I'm starting to worry about you, sweetie." She put her head on my chest, a welcome burden. "You've been so edgy since Milo got you into all of this. I never knew you before, but from what you told me it sounds like the old days."

  "The old Alex wasn't such a bad guy," I reacted defensively.

  She was wisely silent.

  "No," I corrected myself. "The old Alex was a bore. I promise not to bring him back, okay?"

  "Okay." She kissed the tip of my chin.

  "Just give me a little time to get through this."

  "All right."

  But as I dressed she looked at me with a combination of worry, hurt, and confusion. When I started to say something, she turned away. I sat down on the edge of the bed and took her in my arms. I rocked her until her arms slid around my neck.

  "I love yo
u," I said. "Give me a little time."

  She made a warm sound and held me tighter.

  When I left her she was sleeping, her eyelids fluttering in the throes of the first dream of the night.

  I tore into the one hundred and twenty files I had set aside, working until the early morning hours. Most of these turned out also to be rather mundane documents. Ninety-one of the patients were physically ill men whom Handler had seen as a consultant when he was still working at Cedars-Sinai as part of the liaison psychiatry team. Another twenty had been diagnosed schizophrenic, but they turned out to be senile (median age, seventy-six) patients at a convalescent hospital where he'd worked for a year.

  The remaining nine men were of interest. Handler had diagnosed them all as psychopathic character disorders. Of course those diagnoses were suspect, as I had little faith in his judgment. Nevertheless the files were worth examining more closely.

  They were all between the ages of sixteen and thirty-two. Most had been referred by agencies--the Probation Department, the California Youth Authority, local churches. A couple had experienced several scrapes with the law. At least three were judged violent. Of these, one had beaten up his father, another had stabbed a fellow high school student, and the third had used an automobile to run down someone with whom he'd exchanged angry words.

  A bunch of real sweethearts.

  None of them had been involved in therapy for very long, which was not surprising. Psychotherapy hasn't much to offer the person with no conscience, no morals, and, quite often, no desire to change. In fact, the psychopath by his very nature is an affront to modern psychology, with its egalitarian and optimistic philosophical underpinnings.

  Therapists become therapists because down deep they feel that people are really good and have the capacity to change for the better. The notion that there exist individuals who are simply evil--bad people-and that such evil cannot be explained by any existing combination of nature or nurture is an assault upon a therapist's sensitivities. The psychopath is to the psychologist and the psychiatrist what the terminal cancer patient is to the physician: walking, breathing evidence of hopelessness and failure.

  I knew such evil people existed. I had seen a mercifully small number of them, mostly adolescents, but some children. I remember one boy, in particular, not yet twelve years old, but possessed of a cynical, hardened, cruelly grinning face that would have done a San

  Quentin lifer proud. He'd handed me his business card--a bright rectangle of shocking pink paper with his name on it, followed by the single word Enterprises.

  And an enterprising young man he had been. Buttressed by my assurances of confidentiality, he had told me proudly, of the dozens of bicycles he had stolen, of the burglaries he had pulled off, of the teenage girls he had seduced. He was so pleased with himself.

  He had lost his parents in a plane crash at the age of four and had been brought up by a baffled grandmother who tried to assure everyone--and herself-that down deep he was a good boy. But he wasn't. He was a bad boy. When I asked him if he remembered his mother, he leered and told me she looked like a real piece of ass in the pictures he had seen. It wasn't defensive posturing. It was really him.

  The more time I spent with him, the more discouraged I grew. It was like peeling an onion and finding each inner layer more rotten than the last. He was a bad boy, irredeemably so. Most likely, he would get worse.

  And there was nothing I could do. There was little doubt he would end up establishing an anti-social career. If society was lucky, it would be limited to con games. If not, a lot of blood would be shed. Logic dictated that he should be locked up, kept out of harm's way, incarcerated for the protection of the rest of us. But democracy said otherwise, and, on balance, I had to admit it shouldn't be any other way.

  Still, there were nights when I thought of that eleven-year-old and wondered if I'd be seeing his name in the papers one day.

  I set the nine files aside.

  Milo would have more of his work cut out for him.

  10

  Three days of the old wear-down-the-shoe-leather routine had worn Milo down.

  "The computer was a total bust," he lamented, flopping down on my leather sofa. "All of those bastards are either back in the joint, dead, or alibied. The coroner's report has no forensic magic for us. Just six and a half pages of gory details telling us what we knew the first time we saw the bodies: Handler and Gutierrez were hacked up like sausage filler."

  I brought him a beer, which he drained in two long gulps. I brought him another.

  "What about Handler? Anything on him?" I asked.

  "Oh yeah, you were definitely right in your initial impression. The guy was no Mr. Ethical. But it doesn't lead anywhere."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Six years ago, when he was doing hospital consultations, there was a bit of a stink--insurance fraud. Handler and some others were running a little scam. They'd peek their heads in for a second, say hello to a patient, and bill it as a full visit, which I take it is supposed to be forty-five or fifty minutes long. Then they'd make a note in the chart, bill for another visit, talk to the nurse, another visit, talk to the doctor, etc." etc. It was big bucks--one guy could put in for thirty, forty visits a day, at seventy, eighty bucks a visit. Figure it out."

  "No surprise. It's done all the time."

  "I'm sure. Anyway, it blew wide open because one of the patients had a son who was a doctor, and he started to get suspicious, reading the chart, seeing all these psychiatric visits. Especially 'cause the old man had been unconscious for three months. He griped to the medical director, who called Handler and the others in on the carpet. They kept it quiet, on the condition that the crooked shrinks leave."

  Six years ago. Just before Handler's notes had started to get slipshod and sarcastic. It must have been hard going from four hundred grand a year to a measly one hundred. And having to actually work for it. A man could get bitter...

  "And you don't see an angle in that?"

  "What? Revenge? From whom? It was insurance companies that were getting bilked. That's how they kept it going so long. They never billed the patients, just billed insurance." He took a swig of beer. "I've heard bad things about insurance companies, pal, but I can't see them sending around Jack the Ripper to avenge their honor."

  "I see what you mean."

  He got up and paced the room.

  "This goddamn case sucks. It's been a week and I've got absolutely zilch. The captain sees it as a dead end. He's pulled Del off and left me with the whole stinking mess. Tough breaks for the faggot."

  "Another beer?" I held one out to him.

  "Yeah, goddammit, why not? Drown it all in suds." He wheeled around. "I tell you, Alex, I should have been a schoolteacher. Viet Nam left me with this big psychic hole, you know? All that death for nothing.

  I thought becoming a cop would help me fill that hole, catch bad guys, make some sense out of it all. Jesus, was I wrong!"

  He grabbed the Coors out of my hand, tilted it over his mouth, and let some of the foam dribble down his chin.

  "The things that I see--the monstrous things that we supposed humans do to each other. The shit I've become inured to. Sometimes it makes me want to puke."

  He drank silently for a few minutes.

  "You're a goddamn good listener, Alex. All that training wasn't for naught."

  "One good turn, my friend."

  "Yeah, right. Now that you mention it, Hickle was another shitty case. I never convinced myself that was suicide. It stunk to high heaven."

  "You never told me."

  "What's to tell? I've no evidence. Just a gut feeling. I've got lots of gut feelings. Some of them gnaw at me and keep me up at night. To paraphrase Del, my gut feelings and ten cents."

  He crushed the empty can between his thumb and forefinger, with the ease of someone pulverizing a gnat.

  "Hickle stunk to high heaven, but I had no evidence. So I wrote it off. Like a bad debt. No one argued, no one gave a shit, just l
ike no one'll give a shit when we write off Handler and the Gutierrez girl. Keep the records tidy, wrap it up, seal it, and kiss it goodbye."

  Seven more beers, another half-hour of ranting and punishing himself, and he was stoned drunk. He crashed on the leather sofa, going down like a B-52 with a bellyful of shrapnel.

  I slipped his shoes off and placed them on the floor beside him. I was about just to leave him that way, when I realized it had turned dark.

  I called his home number. A deep, rich male voice answered.

  "Hello."

  "Hello, this is Alex Delaware, Milo's friend."