When the Bough Breaks Read online

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  My life had been frantic ever since adolescence. A straight-A student, I started college at sixteen, worked my way through school free-lancing as a guitarist, and churned through the doctoral program in clinical psychology at UCLA, earning a Ph.D. at twenty-four. I accepted an internship up north at the Langley Porter Institute, then returned to L.A. to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at Western Pediatric Medical Center. Once out of training I took a staff position at the hospital and a simultaneous professorship at the medical school affiliated with Western Peds. I saw lots of patients and published lots of papers.

  By twenty-eight I was an associate professor of pediatrics and psychology and director of a support program for medically ill youngsters. I had a title too long for my secretaries to memorize and I kept publishing, constructing a paper tower within which I dwelled: case studies, controlled experiments, surveys, monographs, textbook chapters and an esoteric volume of my own on the psychological effects of chronic disease in children.

  The status was great, the pay less so. I began to moonlight, seeing private patients in an office rented from a Beverly Hills analyst. My patient load increased until I was putting in seventy hours a week and running between hospital and office like a deranged worker ant.

  I entered the world of tax avoidance after discovering that without write-offs and shelters I'd be paying out to the IRS more than I used to consider a healthy yearly income. I hired and fired accountants, bought California real estate before the boom, sold at scandalous profits, bought more. I became an apartment house manager--another five to ten hours a week. I supported a battalion of service personnel--gardeners, plumbers, painters and electricians. I received lots of calendars at Christmas.

  By the age of thirty-two, I had a non-stop regimen of working to the point of exhaustion, grabbing a few hours of fitful sleep and getting up to work some more. I grew a beard to save five minutes shaving time in the morning. When I remembered to eat, the food came out of hospital vending machines and I stuffed my mouth while zipping down the corridors, white coat flapping, notepad in hand, like some impassioned speed freak. I was a man with a mission, albeit a mindless one.

  I was successful.

  There was little time for romance in such a life. I engaged in occasional carnal liaisons, frenzied and meaningless, with nurses, female interns, graduate students and social workers. Not to forget the fortyish, leggy blond secretary--not my type at all had I taken the time to think--who captivated me for twenty minutes of thrashing behind the chart-stuffed shelves of the medical records room.

  By day it was committee meetings, paperwork, trying to quell petty staff bickering and more paperwork. By night it was facing the tide of parental complaints that the child therapist grows accustomed to, and providing comfort and support to the young ones caught in the crossfire.

  In my spare time I received tenants' gripes, scanned The Wall Street Journal to measure my gains and losses, and sorted through mountains of mail, most of it, it seemed, from white-collared, white toothed smoothies who had ways of making me instantly rich. I was nominated as an Outstanding Young Man by an outfit hoping to sell me their hundred dollar, leather-bound directory of similarly-honored individuals. In the middle of the day, there were times, suddenly, when I found it hard to breathe, but I brushed it off, too busy for introspection.

  Into this maelstrom stepped Stuart Hickle.

  Hickle was a quiet man, a retired lab technician. He looked the part of the kindly neighbor on a situation comedy--tall, stooped, fiftyish, fond of cardigans and old briar pipes. His tortoise-shell horn-rims perched atop a thin, pinched nose shielding kindly eyes the color of dishwater. He had a benign smile and avuncular mannerisms.

  He also had an unhealthy appetite for fondling little children's privates.

  When the police finally got him, they confiscated over five hundred color photographs of Hickle having his way with scores of two-, three-, four- and five-year-olds--boys and girls, white, black, Hispanic. In matters of gender and race he wasn't picky. Only age and helplessness concerned him.

  When I saw the photos it wasn't the graphic starkness that got to me, though that was repulsive in its own right. It was the look in the kids' eyes--a terrified yet knowing vulnerability. It was a look that said / know this is wrong. Why is this happening to me? The look was in every snapshot, on the face of the youngest victim.

  It personified violation.

  It gave me nightmares.

  Hickle had unique access to little children. His wife, a Korean orphan whom he'd met as a GI in Seoul, ran a successful day-care center in affluent Brentwood.

  Kim's Korner had a solid reputation as one of the best places to leave your children when you had to work or play or just be alone. It had been in business for a decade when the scandal broke, and despite the evidence there were plenty of people who refused to believe that the school had served as a haven for one man's pedophilic rituals.

  The school had been a cheerful-looking place, occupying a large, two-story house on a quiet residential street not far from UCLA. In its last year, it had cared for over forty children, most of them from affluent families. A large proportion of Kim Hickle's charges had been very young because she was one of the few day-care operators to accept children not yet toilet trained.

  The house had a basement--a rarity in earthquake country--and the police spent a considerable amount of time in that damp, cavernous room. They found an old army cot, a refrigerator, a rusty sink and five thousand dollars' worth of photographic equipment. Particular scrutiny was given to the cot, for it served up a host of fascinating forensic details--hair, blood, sweat and semen.

  The media latched on to the Hickle case with predictable vigor. This was a juicy one that played on everyone's primal fears, evoking memories of the Cosmic Bogeyman. The evening news featured Kim Hickle fleeing a mob of reporters, hands over face. She protested her ignorance. There was no evidence of her complicity so they closed the school down, took away her license and left it at that. She filed for divorce and departed for parts unknown.

  I had my doubts about her innocence. I'd seen enough of these cases to know that the wives of child molesters often played a role, explicit or covert, in setting up the dirty deed. Usually these were women who found sex and physical intimacy abhorrent, and in order to get out of conjugal chores, they helped find substitute partners for their men. It could be a cold, cruel parody of a harem joke--I'd seen one case where the father had been bedding three of his daughters on a scheduled basis, with mom drawing up the schedule.

  It was also hard to believe that Kim Hickle had been playing Legos with the kids while downstairs Stuart was molesting them. Nevertheless, they let her go.

  Hickle himself was thrown to the wolves. The TV cameras didn't miss a shot. There were lots of instant mini-specials, filled with interviews with the more vocal of my colleagues, and several editorials about the rights of children.

  The hoopla lasted two weeks, then the story lost its appeal and was replaced by reports of other atrocities. Foe there was no lack of nasty stories in L.A. The city spawned ugliness like a predatory insect spewing out blood-hungry larvae.

  I was consulted on the case three weeks after the arrest. It was a back-page story now and someone got to thinking about the victims.

  The victims were going through hell.

  The children woke up screaming in the middle of the night. Toddlers who'd been toilet-trained started to wet and soil themselves. Formerly quiet, well-behaved kids began to hit, kick and bite without provocation. There were lots of stomach aches and ambiguous physical symptoms reported, as well as the classic signs of depression--loss of appetite, listlessness, withdrawal, feelings of worthlessness.

  The parents were racked with guilt and shame, seeing or imagining the accusing glances of family and friends. Husbands and wives turned on each other. Some of them spoiled the victimized children, increasing the youngsters' insecurity and infuriating the siblings. Later, several brothers and s
isters were able to admit that they'd wished they'd been molested in order to be eligible for special treatment. Then they'd felt guilty about those thoughts.

  Entire families were coming apart, much of their suffering obscured by the public blood lust for Hickle's head. The families might have been permanently shunted to obscurity, saddled with their confusion, guilt and fear but for the fact that the great aunt of one of the victims was a philanthropic member of the board of Western Pediatric Medical Center. She wondered out loud why the hell the hospital wasn't doing anything, and where was the institution's sense of public service, anyway. The chairman of the board salaamed and simultaneously saw the chance to grab some good press. The last story about Western Peds had exposed salmonella in the cafeteria's cole slaw, so positive PR. was mighty welcome.

  The medical director issued a press release announcing a psychological rehabilitation program for the victims of Stuart Hickle, with me as therapist. My first inkling of being appointed was reading about it in the Times.

  When I got to his office the next morning I was ushered in immediately. The director, a pediatric surgeon who hadn't operated in twenty years and had acquired the smugness of a well-fed bureaucrat, sat behind a gleaming desk the size of a hockey field and smiled.

  "What's going on, Henry?" I held up the newspaper.

  "Sit down, Alex. I was just about to call you. The board decided you'd be perfect--pluperfect--for the job. Some urgency was called for."

  "I'm flattered."

  "The board remembered the beautiful work you did with the Brownings."

  "Brownells."

  "Yes, whatever."

  The five Brownell youngsters had survived a light plane crash in the Sierras that had killed their parents. They'd been physically and psychologically traumatized --over-exposed, half-starved, amnesiac, mute. I'd worked with them for two months and the papers had picked up on it.

  "You know, Alex," the director was saying, "sometimes in the midst of trying to synthesize the high technology and heroics that comprise so much of modern medicine, one loses sight of the human factor."

  It was a great little speech. I hoped he'd remember it when budget time rolled around next year.

  He went on stroking me, talking about the need for the hospital to be in the "forefront of humanitarian endeavors," then smiled and leaned forward.

  "Also, I imagine there'd be significant research potential in all of this--at least two or three publications by June."

  June was when I came up for full professorship. The director was on the tenure committee at the medical school.

  "Henry, I believe you're appealing to my baser instincts."

  "Perish the thought." He winked slyly. "Our main interest is helping those poor, poor children." He shook his head. "A truly repugnant affair. The man should be castrated." A surgeon's justice.

  I threw myself, with customary monomania, into designing the treatment program. I received permission to run the therapy sessions in my private office after promising that Western Peds would get all the credit.

  My goals were to help the families express the feelings that had been locked inside since Hickle's subterranean rites had been exposed, and to help them share those feelings with each other in order to see that they weren't alone. The therapy was designed as an intensive, six-week program, using groups--the kids, parents, siblings and multiple families--as well as individual sessions as needed. Eighty percent of the families signed up and no one dropped out. We met at night in my suite on Wilshire, when the building was quiet and empty.

  There were nights when I left the sessions physically and emotionally drained after hearing the anguish pour out like blood from a gaping wound. Don't let anyone ever tell you different: Psychotherapy is one of the most taxing endeavors known to mankind. I've done all sorts of work, from picking carrots in the scorching sun to sitting on national committees in paneled boardrooms, and there's nothing that compares to confronting human misery, hour after hour, and bearing the responsibility for easing that misery using only one's mind and mouth. At its best it's tremendously uplifting, as you watch the patient open up, breathe, let go of the pain. At its worst it's like surfing in a cesspool, struggling for balance while being slapped with wave after putrid wave.

  The treatment worked. Sparkle returned to the kids' eyes. The families reached out and helped each other. Gradually, my role diminished to that of silent observer.

  A few days before the last session I received a call from a reporter for National Medical News--a throwaway for physicians. His name was Bill Roberts, he was in town and wanted to interview me. The piece would be for practicing pediatricians, to alert them to the issue of child molestation. It sounded like a worthy project and I agreed to meet him.

  It was seven-thirty in the evening when I nosed my car out of the hospital parking lot and headed westward. Traffic was light and I reached the black-granite-and-glass tower that housed my office by eight. I parked in the subterranean garage, walked through double glass doors into a lobby that was silent save for Muzak and rode the elevator to the sixth floor. The doors slid open, I made my way down the corridor, turned a corner and stopped.

  There was nobody waiting for me, which was unusual because I'd always found reporters to be punctual.

  I approached my office door and saw a stiletto of light slashed diagonally across the floor. The door was ajar, perhaps an inch. I wondered if the night cleaning crew had let Roberts in. If so I'd have a talk with the building manager over that breach of security.

  When I reached the door I knew something was wrong. There were scratch marks around the knob, metal filings in the rug. Yet, as if working from a script, I entered.

  "Mr. Roberts?"

  The waiting room was empty. I went into the consultation office. The man on my sofa wasn't Bill Roberts. I'd never met him but I knew him very well.

  Stuart Hickle slumped in the soft cotton cushions. His head--what was left of it--was propped against the wall, the eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling. His legs splayed out spastically. One hand rested near a wet spot on his groin. He had an erection. The veins in his neck stood out in has relief. His other hand lay limply across his chest. One finger hooked around the trigger of an ugly little blue steel pistol. The gun dangled, butt downward, the muzzle an inch from Hickle's open mouth. There were bits of brain, blood and bone on the wall behind the head. A crimson splotch decorated the soft-green print of the wallpaper like a child's finger painting More crimson ran out of the nose, the ears and the mouth. The room smelled of firecrackers and human waste.

  I dialed the phone.

  The coroner's verdict was death by suicide. The final version went something like this: Hickle had been profoundly depressed since his arrest and, unable to bear the public humiliation of a trial, he'd taken the Samurai way out. It was he, as Bill Roberts, who'd set up the appointment with me, he who'd picked the lock and blown his brains out. When the police played me tapes of his confession the voice did sound similar to that of "Roberts"--at least similar enough to prevent my saying it wasn't a match.

  As for why he'd chosen my office for his swan song, the supporting cast of shrinks had an easy answer: Because of my role as the victims' therapist, I was a symbolic father figure, undoing the damage he'd perpetrated. His death was an equally symbolic gesture of repentance.

  Finis.

  But even suicides--especially those connected with felonies--must be investigated, the loose ends tied up, and there began a buck-passing contest between the Beverly Hills Police Department and LAPD. Beverly Hills acknowledged the suicide had taken place on their turf but claimed that it was an extension of the original crimes--which had occurred in West L.A. Division territory. Punt. West L.A. would have liked to kick it back but the case was still in the papers and the last thing the department wanted was a dereliction-of duties story.

  So West L.A. got stuck with it. Specifically, Homicide Detective Milo Bernard Sturgis got stuck with it.

  I didn't start to have probl
ems until a week after finding Hickle's body, a normal delay, because I was denying the whole thing and was more than a little numb. Since, as a psychologist, I was presumed able to handle such things, no one thought to inquire after my welfare.

  I held myself in check when facing the children and their families, creating a facade that was calm, knowledgeable and accepting. I looked in control. In therapy we talked about Hickle's death, with an emphasis upon them, upon how they were coping.

  The last session was a party during which the families thanked me, hugged me and gave me a framed print of Braggs' The Psychologist. It was a good party, lots of laughter and mess on the carpet, as they rejoiced at getting better, and, in part, at the death of their tormentor.

  I got home close to midnight and crawled between the covers feeling hollow, cold and helpless, like an orphaned child on an empty road. The next morning the symptoms began.

  I grew fidgety and had trouble concentrating. The episodes of labored breathing increased and intensified. I became unaccountably anxious, had a constantly queasy feeling in my gut, and suffered from premonitions of death.