Bad Love (18 page)

She pressed the skinny upper lip with one finger, as if keeping it still.

“No one knew what he was doing to her. I was right here, going about my business the whole time he was — the treatment rooms are totally soundproofed. He—” She removed her finger. A white pressure circle dotted her lip, then slowly faded.

“Then I heard noise from the hall,” she said. “That horrible screaming — he just kept
screaming
.”

“ ’Bad love,’ ” I said.

Her mouth remained open. The blue eyes dulled for a second. “Yes . . . he . . . I went out to Mary’s office and she wasn’t there, so I opened the door to the hall and saw him. Screaming, waving it — the knife
— splashing
blood, the wall — he saw me — I saw his eyes settle on me — focusing — and he kept screaming. I slammed the door, shoved Mary’s desk up against it, and ran back into my office. Slammed
that
door and blocked
it
. I hid behind my chair the whole time it was . . . it wasn’t till later that I found out he’d grabbed Adeline.” She wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry, you don’t need to hear this.”

“No, no, please.”

She glanced at her message pad. Blank. Picking up the pen, she wrote something on it.

“No, that’s it — I’ve told it so many times . . . no one knows how long he — if she suffered for a long time. That’s the one thing I
can
hope. That she didn’t. The thought of her trapped in there with him . . .” She shook her head and touched her temples. “They soundproofed the rooms back in the sixties, when this place was a Vietnam veterans’ counseling center. We sure don’t need it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because
no one
does much therapy around here.”

She took a deep breath and slapped her hands lightly on the desk. “Life goes on, right? Would you like something to drink? We’ve got a coffee machine in the other wing. I can have Mary go get some.”

“No, thanks.”

“Lucky choice.” Smile. “It’s actually pretty vile.”

“How come no one does much therapy?” I said. “Too disturbed a population?”

“Too disturbed, too poor, too many of them. They need food and shelter and to stop hearing voices. The preferred treatment is Thorazine. And Haldol and lithium and Tegretol and whatever else chases the demons away. Counseling would be a nice luxury, but with our caseload it ends up being a very low priority. Not to mention funding. That’s why we don’t have any psychologists on our staff, just caseworkers, and most of them are SWAs — assistants. Like Becky.”

“On the way in I saw a doctor giving out prescriptions.”

“That’s right,” she said. “It’s Friday, isn’t it? That’s Dr. Wintell, our once-a-week psychiatrist. He’s just out of his residency, a real nice kid. But when his practice builds up, he’ll be out of here like all the others.”

“If no one does therapy, what was Becky doing with Hewitt in the therapy room?”

“I didn’t say we never talk to our people, just that we don’t do much insight work. Sometimes we get cramped for space and the workers use the treatment rooms to do their paperwork. Basically, all of us use what’s on hand. As to what Becky was doing with him, it could have been anything. Giving him a voucher for an SRO hotel, telling him where to get deloused. Then again, maybe she
was
trying to get into his head — she was that kind of person.”

“What kind is that?”

“An optimist. Idealistic. Most of us start out that way, don’t we?”

I nodded. “Did Hewitt have a history of violence?”

“None that was listed in our files. He’d been arrested just a few weeks before for theft and was due to stand trial — maybe she was counseling him about that. There was
nothing
on paper that would have warned us. And even if he was violent, there’s a good chance the information would never have gotten to us, with all the red tape.”

She put down her pen and looked at me. Flipped her hair. “The truth is, he was exactly like so many others who come in and out of here — there’s still no way to know.”

She picked up one of the folders.

“This is his file. The police confiscated it and returned it, so I guess it’s not confidential anymore.”

Inside were only two sheets, one clipped to each of the covers. The first was an intake form listing Dorsey Hewitt’s age as thirty-one and his address as “none.” Under
REASON FOR REFERRAL
someone had written “multiple social problems.” Under
DIAGNOSIS:
“prob. chron. schiz.” The rest of the categories
— PROGNOSIS, FAMILY SUPPORT, MEDICAL HISTORY, OTHER PSYCH. TREATMENT —
had been left blank. Nothing about “bad love.”

At the bottom of the form were notations of referral for food stamps. The signature read, “R. Basille, SWA.”

The facing page was white and smooth, marked only with the notation, “Will follow as needed, R.B., SWA.” The date was eight weeks prior to the murder. I handed the folder back.

“Not much,” I said.

She gave a sad smile. “Paperwork wasn’t Becky’s forte.”

“So you have no idea how many times she actually saw him?”

“Guess that doesn’t say much for my administrative skills, does it? But I’m not one of those people who believes in riding the staff, checking out every little picayune detail. I try to find the best people I can, motivate them, and give them room to move. Generally it works out. With Becky . . .”

She threw up her hands. “She was a doll, a really sweet person. Not much for rules and regulations, but so what?”

She shook her head. “We’d talked about it — helping her get her paperwork in on time. She promised to try, but to tell the truth, I didn’t harbor much hope. And I didn’t care. Because she was productive where it counted — getting on the phone all day with agencies and arguing for every last penny for her cases. She stayed late, did whatever it took to help them. Who knows? Maybe she was going that extra mile for Hewitt.”

She picked up the phone. “Mary? Coffee, please. . . . No, just one.”

Putting it down, she said, “The
real
horror is that it could happen again. We have a steel corral now, to direct them out onto the street after they get their meds. The county finally sent us a guard and the detector, but you tell me how to predict which of them is going to blow.”

“We’re not very good prophets under the best of circumstances.”

“No, we’re not. Hundreds of people file in here each week, for meds and vouchers. We’ve
got
to let them in. We’re the court of last resort. Any of them could be another Hewitt. Even if we wanted to lock them up, we couldn’t. The state hospitals that haven’t been shut down are filled to capacity — I don’t know what your theory is about psychosis, but mine is that most psychotics are born with it — it’s biological, like any other illness. But instead of treating them, we demonize them or idealize them, and they get caught in the squeeze between the do-gooders who think they should be allowed to run free and the skinflints who think all they need is to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.”

“I know,” I said. “When I was in grad school the whole community psych thing was in full bloom — schizophrenia as an alternative lifestyle, liberating patients from the back wards and empowering them to take over their own treatment.”

“Empowering.” She laughed without opening her mouth.

“I had a professor who was a fanatic on the subject,” I said. “Studied the mental health system in Belgium or somewhere and wrote a book on it. He had us do a paper on deinstitutionalization. The more I researched it, the less feasible it seemed. I started to wonder what would happen to psychotics who needed medication and couldn’t be counted upon to take it. He handed the paper back with one comment, “Medication is mind control,’ and gave me a C-minus.”

“Well,
I
give you an A. Some of
our
patients can’t be counted upon to feed themselves, let alone calibrate dosage. In my opinion, deinstitutionalization’s the major culprit in the homeless problem. Sure, some street people are working folks who hit the skids, but at least thirty or forty percent are severely mentally debilitated. They belong in hospitals, not under some freeway. And now with all the weird street drugs out there, the old cliché that the mentally ill aren’t violent just isn’t true anymore. Each year it gets uglier and uglier, Dr. Delaware. I pray there won’t be another Hewitt, but I don’t count on it.”

“Do you try at all to identify which patients are violent?”

“If we have police records, we take them seriously, but like I said, that’s rare. We’ve got to be our own police here. If someone goes around making threats, we call security. But most of them are quiet. Hewitt was. Didn’t really relate to anyone else that I’m aware of — that’s why we’re probably not going to be much help to Detective Sturgis. What exactly is he after, anyway?”

“Apparently, he suspects Hewitt had a friend who may be harassing some people, and he’s trying to find out if the friend was a patient here.”

“Well, after Sturgis called me I asked some of the other workers if they’d seen Hewitt with anyone, and none of them had. The only one who might have known was Becky.”

“Is she the only one who worked with him?”

She nodded.

“How long had she been working here?”

“A little over a year. She got her assistantship from junior college last summer and applied right afterward. One of those second careers — she’d worked as a secretary for a while, decided to go back to school in order to do something socially important — her words.”

Her eyes flickered and her mouth set — the lower lip compressing and making her look older.

“Such a sweet girl,” she said. She shook her head, then looked at me. “You know — I just thought of something. Hewitt’s attorney — the one defending him on that theft thing?
He
might know if Hewitt had any friends. I think I’ve got his name tucked away somewhere — hold on.”

She went to the file, opened the middle drawer, and began flipping. “Just one second, so much junk in here. . . . He called me — the attorney — after Becky’s murder. Wanting to know if there was anything he could do. I think he wanted to talk — to get his own guilt off his chest. I didn’t have time for . . . ah, here we go.”

She pulled out a piece of cardboard stapled with business cards. Working a staple free with her fingernails, she removed a card and gave it to me.

Cheap white paper, green letters.

Andrew Coburg

Attorney-at-Law

The Human Interest Law Center

1912 Lincoln Avenue

Venice, California

“Human interest law,” I said.

“I think it’s one of those storefront things.”

“Thanks,” I said, pocketing the card. “I’ll pass it along to Detective Sturgis.”

The door opened and Mary came in with the coffee.

Jean Jeffers thanked her and told her to tell someone named Amy that she’d be ready to see her in a minute.

When the door closed, she began stirring her coffee.

“Well,” she said, “it was nice talking to you. Sorry I couldn’t do more.”

“Thanks for your time,” I said. “Is there anyone else I could talk to who might be able to help?”

“No one I can think of.”

“What about the woman he took hostage?”

“Adeline? Now there’s a
really
sad story. She’d transferred over here a month before from a center in South Central because she had high blood pressure and wanted a safer environment.”

She threw up her hands again and gave a sour laugh.

“Any particular reason Hewitt grabbed
her
?” I said.

“You mean did she know him?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. The hair flap obscured her eye and she left it there. “Just pure bad luck. She happened to be sitting at a desk in the hall, working, just as he was running out, and he grabbed her.”

She walked me to the door. People kept coming out of the psychiatrist’s office. She looked at them.

“How can you ever know someone like that, anyway?” she said. “When you get down to it, how can you ever really know anyone?”

I decided to drive to Andrew Coburg’s office and tender an appeal to his human interest. Getting onto Pico, I drove to Lincoln and headed south into Venice.

The Human Interest Law Center turned out, indeed, to be a storefront — one of three set into an old mustard-colored, one-story building. The brick facade was chipped. Next door was a liquor store advertising screwtop wine on special. The other side was vacant. On the window was painted
DELI *** LUNCH & DINNER.

The law office window was papered with wrinkled aluminum foil. An American flag hung over the doorway. Printed on one of the white stripes was
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS.

The door was closed but unlocked. As I pushed it open a bell tinkled, but no one came out to greet me. In front of me was a particle-board partition. A black arrow pointed left and handpainted signs said
WELCOME!
and
BIENVENIDOS!
A mass of noise — voices, phone rings, clicking typewriter keys — came from the other side.

I followed the arrow around the partition to a single large room, long and narrow. The walls were gray-white and crowded with bulletin boards and posters, the ceiling a high, dark nest of ductwork, electrical wiring, and stammering fluorescent tubes.

No secretary or receptionist. Eight or nine mismatched desks were spread around the room, each equipped with a black dial phone, a typewriter, and a facing chair. Behind each chair was a U-shaped construction of PVC tubing. White muslin curtains hung from the frame — the kind used for mock privacy in hospitals. Some of the curtains were drawn, others were open. Shoes and cuffs were visible beneath the hems of the drawn drapes.

Young people sat behind the desks, talking into phones or to people in the chairs. The clients were mostly black or Hispanic. Some looked asleep. One of them — an old man of indeterminate race — held a terrier mutt on his lap. A few small children wandered around looking lost.

The desk nearest to me was occupied by a dark-haired man wearing a green plaid suit jacket, white shirt, and bolo tie. He needed a shave, his hair was greased, and his face was as sharp as an icepick. Though the phone receiver was cradled under his chin, he didn’t appear to be talking or listening, and his eyes drifted over to me.