Time Bomb Read online

  “Just that she was odd. Her family was odd.”

  “Odd in what way?”

  “She didn’t get more specific. Didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “The Ferg tends to get overwhelmed—a little Victorian,” she said. “To her, odd could mean anything... using the wrong fork at dinner. But I’ll have a talk with her, see what I can learn.”

  “What about transcripts?” I said. “Can you look them up?”

  “There may be some old records, but I’m not sure. Before we started busing the East Side kids in, the place was cleaned up. Most of the files were moved downtown. I’ll check tomorrow.”

  “How long have you been working at Hale?”

  “Since last year—they brought me in with the buses. First assignment out of postdoctoral probation. I think they sensed I was trouble, wanted to get rid of me quickly and thought a few months at Hale would do it.”

  I said, “It is a hell of a way to start.”

  She grinned. “Fooled ’em and stuck it out. Too young and too dumb to know better.”

  “Same thing happened to me when I started out,” I said. “I was offered a very tough job right out of fellowship—working with kids with cancer. By the time I was twenty-seven I was directing a program for two thousand patients, overseeing a staff of a dozen. Trial by ordeal, but looking back, I’m glad I did it.”

  “Cancer. How depressing.”

  “It was, at times. But also uplifting. Lots of the kids went into remission. Some were cured—more and more each year. We ended up doing a lot of rehab—helping families cope, pain reduction, sibling counseling—clinical research that could be applied almost immediately. That was satisfying: seeing your theories come to life. Being useful in the short term. I really felt I was doing some good, making an impact.”

  “Twenty-seven. God. How old were you when you got your Ph.D.?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  She gave a low whistle. “Whiz kid, huh?”

  “Nah, just obsessive. I started college at sixteen, kept pushing.”

  “Sounds like false modesty to me,” she said: “Actually, I was sixteen when I started, too. But in my case it really was no big deal. Small school back in Texas—anyone with fluent English and half a brain skipped.”

  “Where in Texas?”

  “San Antonio.”

  I said, “Nice town. I was there about ten years ago, consulting to the med school. Took a river ride, ate grits for the first time, picked up a pair of boots.”

  “Remember the Alamo,” she said, gripping her coffee cup hard.

  More chill. Time to veer onto a different road.

  I said, “So here we are, couple of precocious kids. Enjoying the fruits of success.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, still tense. “Ain’t that a hoot.”

  “What made you decide to stop teaching and go back for your doctorate?”

  “I could give you all these highfalutin explanations, but truth be told, I wasn’t a very good teacher—not enough patience. I found it hard to deal with the ones who weren’t bright. I mean, I could sympathize with them in the abstract. But I’d grind my teeth waiting for them to come up with the right answer.” Shrug. “Not too compassionate, huh?”

  “Compassionate enough to shift gears.”

  “What choice did I have?” she said. “It was either that or become a witch and go home hating myself each night. You, on the other hand, must have tons of patience.”

  “With kids, yes. Not always with the rest of the world.”

  “So how come you don’t do therapy anymore? Detective Sturgis told me you’re retired. I was expecting an old guy.”

  “I stopped a few years ago, haven’t gotten back yet—long story.”

  “I’d like to hear it,” she said.

  I gave her an abridged version of the last five years: Casa de Los Niños, death and degradation. Getting overdosed on human misery, dropping out, living on real estate investments made during the California boom of the late seventies. Then redemption: missing the joys of altruism, but reluctant to commit to long-term therapy, making a compromise—limiting myself to time-limited consultations, forensic referrals from lawyers and judges.

  “And cops,” she said.

  “Just one cop. Milo and I are old friends.”

  “I can understand that—you both have that... heat. Intensity. Wanting to do more than just coast by.” She laughed, sheepish again. “How’s that for sidewalk psychoanalysis, Doc?”

  “I’ll take my compliments any way I can get ’em.”

  She laughed, said, “Real estate investments, huh? Lucky you. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have to work. I mean, sometimes I really despise my job. Maybe I’d opt for Club Med full time.”

  “Your present job can’t be too easy on the old patience.”

  “True,” she said, “but at least now I can close my door, get ticked off, scream my head off, throw something—Carla’s tolerant. I just didn’t want to be losing it in front of the kids—taking it out on them. Also, what you were talking about, the chance to do something, to be effective—on a large-scale basis—is appealing. I mean, if I can institute something systemic, something that really works, I’m affecting a couple of hundred kids at one time. But what I really hate is knowing what has to be done, knowing how to go about doing it, and having all these stupid roadblocks thrown in my way.”

  She shook her head, said, “I really hate bureaucrats. Then some days I sit back, look at all the crap on my desk, and realize I am one.”

  “Ever think of doing something else?”

  “What, and go back to school? No sir. I’m twenty-nine already. Comes a time you have to just settle down and bite the bit.”

  I wiped my brow. “Twenty-nine? Whew. Ready for the old porch rocker.”

  “Sometimes I feel I could use one,” she said. “Look who’s talking—you’re not much older.”

  “Eight years older.”

  “Whoa, grandpa, tighten the truss and pass the Geritol.”

  The waitress came over and asked if we wanted dessert. Linda ordered strawberry shortcake. I chose chocolate ice cream. It tasted chalky and I pushed it aside.

  “No good? Have some of this.”

  Then she blushed again. From the intensity of her color, she might have offered me a bare breast. I remembered how she’d warded off compliments, pegged her as afraid of intimacy, distrustful—nursing some kind of wound. My turn at sidewalk analysis. But then again, why shouldn’t she be reticent? We barely knew each other.

  I took some cake, less out of hunger than not wanting to reject her. She removed most of the whipped cream from her cake, ate a strawberry, and said, “You’re easy to talk to. How come you’re not married?”

  “There’s a certain woman who could answer that for you,” I said.

  She looked up. There was a crumb of cake on her lower lip. “Gee, I’m sorry.”

  “No reason to apologize.”

  “No, I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.... Well, yes, of course I did, didn’t I? That’s exactly what I was doing. Prying. I just didn’t realize I was prying into anything sore.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Just about healed. We all have our sore spots.”

  She didn’t take the bait. “Divorce is so rotten,” she said. “Common as brown sparrows, but rotten just the same.”

  “No divorce,” I said. “We were never married, though we might as well have been.”

  “How long were you together?”

  “A little over five years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No reason for you to apologize for that either.”

  I realized my tone was sharp—irritation at doing all the revealing.

  Tension filled the space between us like an air balloon. We busied ourselves with dessert, let it deflate gradually.

  When we were through, she insisted on separate checks and paid with cash. “Well, Dr. Alex Delaware,” she said, putting away her wallet, “it’s
been edifying, but I’ve got to get home and attack some paper. Will you be coming by tomorrow?”

  “Same time, same station.”

  We stood. She took my hand in both of hers. That same soft, submissive touch, so at odds with the rest of her. Her eyes were soft coals, burning.

  “I really want to thank you,” she said. “You’re a very nice man, and I know I’m not always the easiest person in the world to be around.”

  “I’m not always Joe Mellow either.”

  Face to face. Tight silence. I wanted to kiss her, contented myself with walking her to her car and watching the movement of her hips and legs as she got into it. As she drove off, I realized we’d talked more about ourselves than the sniping.

  But alone, back in the Seville, thoughts of the sniping kept intruding. I picked up an evening final at a 7-Eleven near Barrington, drove to Westwood and north through the village, and examined the front page as I waited out a red light at Hilgard and Sunset.

  Two photos—one of the storage shed, titled SNIPER’S LAIR; the other a head shot of Holly Lynn Burden—shared center top. To the right a 64-point headline shouted SNIPER FIRE BREAKS OUT AT SCHOOL. LATCH AIDE ENDS IT.CHILDREN ON PLAYGROUND FLEE IN PANIC. FEMALE SNIPER SLAIN BY COUNCILMAN’S STAFFER.

  The head shot looked as if it had been taken from a high school yearbook: white collar over dark sweater, single strand of pearls, starched pose. Same face I’d seen on the photocopied driver’s license, but younger, some baby fat softening the edges. Longer hair, flipped at the shoulders. Dark-framed eyeglasses, that same sullen dullness behind them.

  The light turned green. Someone honked. I put down the paper and joined the chrome-surge onto Sunset. Traffic was slow but insistent. When I got home I started reading, skimming the recap of the shooting, slowing down when I got to the bio of the shooter.

  Holly Burden had lived all nineteen years of her life in the house on Jubilo Drive, sharing it with her father, Mahlon Burden, fifty-six, a “widower and self-employed technical consultant.” The contents of the father’s police interview hadn’t been made public and he’d declined to talk to the press, as had a brother, Howard Burden, thirty, of Encino.

  Through “School Board records” the paper had found out about Holly attending Hale but didn’t quote Esme Ferguson or anyone else who remembered her.

  The future sniper had gone on to attend a nearby public junior high, then Pacific Palisades High School, where she’d dropped out one semester short of a diploma.

  Guidance counselors had trouble remembering her, but an adviser at the high school managed to locate grade transcripts showing her to have been a poor student with “no participation in extracurricular activities.” The few instructors who remembered her at all described her as quiet, unobtrusive. One English teacher recalled she’d had “motivational problems, wasn’t academically oriented or competitive,” but hadn’t participated in remedial programs. Not an alumna to brag about, but no one had picked up the slightest hint of serious mental disturbance or violence.

  Neighbors “along the quiet, tree-lined street in this affluent West Side district” were a good deal more forthcoming. Speaking anonymously, they described the Burdens, père et fille, as “unfriendly, secretive”; “not involved in the community, they stuck to themselves.” Mahlon Burden was characterized as “some kind of inventor—some people think he’s eccentric”; Holly was termed “a weird girl who hung around the house all day, usually inside—she never got any sun, was white as a ghost.” “No one really knew what she did with herself—she was a dropout, didn’t go to school or do any kind of work.” “There were rumors she was sick. Maybe it was mental.”

  The reporter used that maybe as a bridge to the next focus of the article: guesswork about the state of Holly Burden’s psyche proffered by the usual pack of experts willing to pontificate without benefit of data. Prominent among the guessers was “Dr. Lance L. Dobbs, clinical psychologist and Director of Cognitive-Spiritual Associates of West Los Angeles, an authority on the psychological impact of childhood stress, hired by the School Board to treat the young victims at the school.”

  Dobbs termed the dead girl a “probable antisocial schizoidal personality or sociopath—it’s the kind of aberrant character that’s made, not born,” and went on to lambaste society for “not meeting the spiritual growth needs of its young people.” He described his treatment plan as a “comprehensive and systematic program of crisis intervention, including the use of bilingual therapists. We’ve already begun working with the victims and have made excellent progress. However, based on prior experience, we do predict severe reactions on the part of some youngsters. They will have to be treated more intensively.”

  Never-never land.

  The article ended with a profile of the hero of the day.

  Darryl “Bud” Ahlward, forty-two, listed as Councilman Gordon Latch’s “chief administrative assistant.” More than just a bodyguard, unless that was Latch’s way of getting high-priced muscle on the city payroll. And muscle did seem to be what Ahlward was all about: former Marine drill instructor, commando, body-builder, martial arts expert. All of which fit the tight-lipped, macho posture I’d seen yesterday.

  What didn’t fit was that kind of crypto-soldier working for someone of Latch’s political pedigree. Apparently, Latch had been asked about it before, explained it by citing a “mutual rapport between Bud and myself, especially vis-à-vis environmental issues.”

  I put the paper aside.

  A pebble-toss of whos, whats, hows.

  No whys.

  I called my service for messages. Routine stuff except for a request to phone Assemblyman Samuel Massengil’s office, accompanied by two numbers—one local, one with a 916 area code. Sacramento. Curious, I phoned the L.A. number, got a recorded message expressing Assemblyman Massengil’s eagerness to be of service to his constituents, followed by a list of other offices and numbers where many “municipal and county services” could be obtained, thus avoiding contact with Assemblyman Massengil.

  Finally, a beep. I left my name and number and went to bed with a head full of questions.

  7

  At eight-thirty the next morning I got a call from a woman with a laugh in her voice. She introduced herself as Beth Bramble, executive assistant to Assemblyman Samuel Massengil. “Thank you for returning our call, Doctor.”

  “Executive assistant,” I said. “Bud Ahlward’s counterpart?”

  Pause. “Not quite, Dr. Delaware.”

  “You don’t have a black belt?”

  Another pause, briefer. “I’ve never known a psychiatrist with a sense of humor.”

  “I’m a psychologist.”

  “Ah. Maybe that explains it.”

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Bramble?”

  “Assemblyman Massengil would like to meet with you.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I really don’t know, Doctor. He’s flying back up to Sacramento this afternoon for a vote, and would be pleased if you could join him this morning for coffee.”

  “I assume this is about the Hale School.”

  “That’s safe to assume,” she said. “What’s a good time for you?”

  “I’m not sure there is one. My work with the children is confidential.”

  “The Assemblyman is well aware of that.”

  “The last thing I want is to get involved in politics, Ms. Bramble.”

  “I assure you, Doctor, no one has any intention of corrupting you.”

  “But you have no idea what this is about.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I really don’t—just delivering the message. Would nine-thirty be too early?”

  The invitation intrigued me, but it smelled bad; my instinct was to stay away. Given Massengil’s temper, it was a tricky situation. Reject him and he just might vent more of his spleen on the school. Then there was the matter of my curiosity...

  I said, “Nine-thirty’s okay. Where?”

  “Our district office is on San Vicente.
In Brentwood.”

  She gave me the address and thanked me for my cooperation. After she hung up, I realized the laugh had left her voice early in the conversation and never returned.

  A blue plastic sign stamped with the state seal was visible just above the address numerals, half-obscured by the leaves of a scrawny hibiscus. The building was anything but imposing, nothing remotely governmental about it. Two stories of white stucco moderne, trimmed with sand-colored brick and sandwiched between a larger, glass-fronted medical structure and a mini-mall whose main attraction was a frozen yogurt parlor. Svelte people in sweats streamed in and out of the parlor, concerned more with body tone than better government.