Bad Love (17 page)

“Judge who?” I said.

“Attaboy — oops, bailiff’s buzzing me, time to be Solomonic again, bye-bye.” I put the phone down. The bulldog placed his paws on my knees and tried to get up on my lap. I lifted him and he settled on me like a warm hunk of clay. At
least
thirty pounds.

The Hockney was right in front of me. Great painting. As was the Thomas Hart Benton drawing on the opposite wall — a mural study depicting hypermuscular workmen cheerfully constructing a WPA dam.

I looked at both of them for a while and wondered what Robin and Milo had talked about. The dog stayed as motionless as a little furry Buddha. I rubbed his head and his jowls and he licked my hand. A boy and his dog . . . I realized I hadn’t gotten the number for the bulldog club, yet. Almost five p.m. Too late to call the AKC.

I’d do it tomorrow morning.

Denial, avoidance, whatever.

That night I slept fitfully. Friday morning at eight I phoned North Carolina and got an address for the French Bulldog Club of America, in Rahway, New Jersey. A post office box. No phone number was available.

At eight-ten, I called the Rodriguez house. A phone company recording said that line had been disconnected. I pictured Evelyn and the girls barreling over a dirt road in Baja, Rodriguez following in his truck. Or maybe the four of them, wandering through Waikiki with glazed tourists’ eyes. If only they knew how much we had in common now . . .

I began unpacking books. At eight thirty-five, the doorbell rang and Milo appeared on one of the TV monitors, tapping a foot and carrying a white bag.

“Breakfast,” he said, as I let him in. “I already gave Ms. Castagna hers. God, that woman works — what’ve you been doing?”

“Getting organized.”

“Sleep okay?”

“Great,” I lied. “Thanks a lot for setting us up.”

He looked around. “How’s the office?”

“Perfect.”

“Great view, huh?”

“To die for.”

We went into the kitchen and he took some onion rolls and two Styrofoam cups of coffee out of the bag.

We sat at a blue granite table. He said, “What’s your schedule like today?”

“It’s pretty open now that the Wallace thing’s on hold. Looks like Grandma decided to take matters into her own hands.”

I recounted what I’d found in Sunland.

He said, “They’re probably better off. If you feel like taking on a little assignment, I’ve got one for you.”

“What?”

“Go over to the Mental Health Center and talk to Ms. Jean Jeffers. I finally got through to her — she actually called me back last night, which I thought was pretty cool for a bureaucrat. Better attitude than I expected, too. Down to earth. Not that she shouldn’t cooperate, after what happened to Becky. I told her we’d come across some harassment crimes — didn’t go into specifics — that we had reason to believe might be coming from one of her patients. Someone we also had reason to believe was a buddy of Hewitt’s. Mentioning
his
name got her going — she went on about how Becky’s murder had traumatized all of them. Still sounds pretty shook up.”

He tore an onion roll into three pieces, placed the segments on the table like monte cards, picked one up, and ate it.

“Anyway, I asked her if she knew who Hewitt hung out with and she said no. Then I asked her if I could look at her patient roster, and she said she wanted to help but no — the confidentiality thing. So I threw Tarasoff at her, hoping she didn’t know the law that well. But she did: no specific threat against a specific victim, no Tarasoff obligation. At
that
point, I played my trump card: told her the department had a consultant doing some profiling work for us on psycho crimes — a genuine “pee aitch dee’ who respected confidentiality and would be discreet, and I gave her your name in case maybe she heard of you. And guess what, she thought she had. Especially after I told her you were semi-famous.”

“Hoo-hah.”

“Hoo-hah to the max. She said she couldn’t promise anything, but she’d be willing to at least talk to you. Maybe there’d be some way to work something out. The more we talked, the friendlier she got. My feeling is she wants to help but is afraid of being burned by more publicity. So be gentle with her.”

“No brass knucks,” I said. “How much do I tell her?”

He ate another piece of roll. “As little as possible.”

“When can she see me?”

“This afternoon. Here’s the number.” He took a scrap of paper out of his pocket, gave it to me, and stood.

“Where you going?” I said.

“Over the hill. Van Nuys. Try to find out what I can about who cut up Myra Paprock five years ago.”

After he was gone, I called in for messages — still nothing from Shirley Rosenblatt in New York — then wrote a letter to the bulldog club informing them I’d found what might possibly be a member’s pet. At nine-thirty, I phoned Jean Jeffers and was put through to her secretary, who sounded as if she’d been expecting me. An appointment with Ms. Jeffers was available in an hour if I was free.

I grabbed a roll, put on a tie, and left.

The center was in a block of cheerless, pastel-colored apartments, in a quiet part of West L.A. not far from Santa Monica. An old, working-class district, near an industrial park whose galloping expansion had been choked off by hard times. Constructus interruptus had left its mark all over the neighborhood — half-framed buildings, empty lots dug out for foundations and left as dry sumps, pigeon-specked
FOR SALE
signs, boarded-up windows on condemned prewar bungalows.

The clinic was the only charming bit of architecture in sight. Its front windows were barred, but boxes filled with begonias hung from the iron. The spot on the sidewalk where Dorsey Hewitt had fallen dead was clean. But for a couple of trash-choked shopping carts in front, it could have been a private sanitarium.

A generous lot next door was two-thirds empty and marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY. NO PATIENT PARKING.
I decided a consultant qualified as someone’s employee, and parked there.

I made my way back to the front of the building, passing the section of wall that had been obsessed upon by the TV camera. A cement cornerstone etched with names of forgotten politicos stated that the building had been dedicated as a veterans clinic in 1919. The door Hewitt had come out of was just to the right, unmarked and locked — two locks, each almost as large as the one sealing Roddy Rodriguez’s brickyard.

The main entrance was dead center, through a squat arch leading to a courtyard with an empty fountain. A loggia to the right of the fountain — the path Hewitt would have taken to get to the unmarked door — was sectioned off by thick steel mesh that looked brand-new. An open hallway on the opposite side led me around the fountain to glass-paned doors.

A blue-uniformed guard stood behind the doors, tall, old, black, chewing gum. He looked me over and unlatched one of the doors, then pointed to a metal detector to his left — one of those walk-through airport things. I set it off and had to give the guard my keys before passing silently.

“Go ’head,” he said, handing them back.

I walked up to a reception desk. A young black woman sat behind more mesh. “Can I help you?”

“Dr. Delaware for Ms. Jeffers.”

“One minute.” She got on the phone. Behind her were three other women at desks, typing and talking into receivers. The windows behind them were barred. Through the bars, I saw trucks, cars, and shadows — the gray, graffitied walls of an alley.

I was standing in a small, unfurnished area painted light green and broken only by a single door to the right. Claustrophobic. It reminded me of the sally port at the county jail and I wondered how a paranoid schizophrenic or someone in crisis would handle it. How easy it would be for someone with a muddled psyche to make it from the no-parking lot, through the metal detector, to this holding cell.

The receptionist said, “Okay, she’s all the way down at the end,” and pressed a button. The door buzzed — not quite as loudly as the one at the pawnshop, but just as obnoxiously — and I opened it and stepped into a very long, cream-colored hall marked by lots of doors. Thick, gray carpeting covered the floor. The light was very bright.

Most of the doors were blank, a few were labeled
THERAPY,
and even fewer bore slide-in signs with people’s names on them. The cream paint smelled fresh; how many coats had it taken to cover up the blood?

The corridor was silent except for my footsteps — the kind of womblike damping that comes only from real soundproofing. As I made my way to the end, a door on the left opened, spilling out people but no noise.

Three people, two women and a man, poorly dressed and shuffling. Not a group; each walked alone. The man was lantern-jawed and stooped, the women heavy and red-faced, with cracked swollen legs and stringy hair. All of them looked down at the carpet as they passed me. They grasped small white pieces of paper, “Rx” stamped at the top.

The room they’d exited was classroom-sized and crowded with another thirty or so people queued up before a metal desk. A young man sat at the desk, talked briefly to each person who stood before him, then filled out a prescription blank and handed it over with a smile. The people in line scuffed forward as automatically as cans on a conveyor belt. Some of them held out their hands in anticipation before they got to the doctor. None of them left without paper, none seemed cheered.

I resumed walking. The door at the end had a slide-in that said
JEAN JEFFERS, MSW, LCSW. DIRECTOR.

Inside was a five-by-five secretarial area occupied by a young, full-faced, Asian woman. Her desk was barely big enough to hold a PC and a blotter. The wall behind her was so narrow that a dark, mock wood door almost filled it. A radio on an end table played soft rock almost inaudibly. A nameplate in front of the computer said
MARY CHIN.

She said, “Dr. Delaware? Go right in, Jean will see you.”

“Thank you.”

She began to open the door. A woman caught it from the other side and pulled it all the way back. Forty-five or so, tall and blond. She wore a crimson shirtdress gathered at the waist by a wide, white belt.

“Doctor? I’m Jean.” She held out her hand. Almost as big as mine, lanolin soft. The left one bore a ruby solitaire ring over a broad, gold wedding band.

More white in her teardrop earrings and a mock ivory bracelet around one wrist. A sensible-looking watch encircled the other.

She had a strong frame and carried no extra fat. The belt showed off a firm waist. Her face was long, lightly tanned, with soft, generous features. Only her upper lip had been skimped upon by nature — not much more than a pencil line. Its mate was full and glossed. Dark blue eyes studied me from under black lashes. Gold-framed half-glasses hung from a white cord around her neck. Her hair was frosted almost white at the tips, clipped short in back and layered back at the sides. Pure utility except for a thick, Veronica Lake flap in front. It swooped to the right, almost hiding her right eye. A handsome woman.

She flipped her hair and smiled.

“Thanks for seeing me,” I said.

“Of course, doctor. Please have a seat.”

Her office was the standard twelve-by-twelve setup, with a real wood desk, two upholstered armchairs, a three-drawer double file, a nearly empty bookcase, and some paintings of seagulls. On the desk were a pen, a memo pad, and a short stack of file folders.

A photo in a standup frame was centered on one of the shelves — she and a nice-looking, heavyset man about her age, the two of them in Hawaiian shirts and bedecked with leis. Social work diplomas made out to Jean Marie LaPorte were propped on another shelf, all from California colleges. I scanned the dates. If she’d graduated college at twenty-two, she was exactly forty-five.

“You’re a clinical psychologist, right?” she said, sitting behind the desk.

I took one of the chairs. “Yes.”

“You know, when Detective Sturgis mentioned your name I thought I recognized it, though I still can’t figure out from where.”

She smiled again. I returned it.

She said, “How does a psychologist come to be a police consultant?”

“By accident, really. Several years ago I was treating some children who’d been abused at a day-care center. I ended up testifying in court and getting involved in the legal system. One thing led to another.”

“Day-care center — the man who took pictures? The one involved with that horrible molesters’ club?”

I nodded.

“Well, that must be where I remember your name from. You were quite a hero, weren’t you?”

“Not really. I did my job.”

“Well,” she said, sitting forward and pushing hair out of her eyes, “I’m sure you’re being modest. Child abuse is so — to tell you the truth, I couldn’t work with it myself. Which may sound funny considering what we deal with here. But children—” She shook her head. “It would be too hard for me to find any sympathy for the abusers even if they were once victims themselves.”

“I know what you mean.”

“To me that’s the lowest — violating a child’s trust. How do you manage to deal with it?”

“It wasn’t easy,” I said. “I saw myself as the child’s ally and tried to do whatever helped.”

“Tried? You don’t do abuse work anymore?”

“Occasionally, when it comes up as part of a custody case. Mostly I consult the court on trauma and divorce issues.”

“Do you do any therapy at all?”

“Not much.”

“Me, neither.” She sat back. “My main goal in school was to become a therapist, but I can’t remember the last time I actually did any real therapy.”

She smiled again and shook her head. The wave of hair covered her eyes and she flipped it back — a curiously adolescent mannerism.

“Anyway,” she said, “about what Detective Sturgis wants, I just don’t know how I can really help. I really need to safeguard our people’s confidentiality — despite what happened to Becky.” She folded her lips inward, lowered her eyes, and shook her head.

I said, “It must have been terrifying.”

“It happened too
quickly
to be terrifying — the
terrifying
part didn’t hit me until after it was over — seeing her . . . what he . . . now I really know what they mean by posttraumatic stress. No substitute for direct experience, huh?”