The Clinic (3 page)

“Did you know her, Alex?”

I shook my head.

The waiter came over. “More wine?”

“Yes,” I said. “Another bottle.”

The next morning, Milo brought me the boxes and left. On top was the academic resume.

Her full name was Hope Alice Devane. Father: Andre. Mother: Charlotte. Both deceased.

UnderMARITAL STATUS, she’d typedMARRIED, but she hadn’t listed Philip Seacrest’s name.

CHILDREN: NONE.

She’d been born in California, in a town I’d never heard of called Higginsville. Probably somewhere in the center of the state, because she’d graduated from Bakersfield High School as class valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar before enrolling at UC Berkeley as a Regent’s Scholar. Dean’s list every quarter, Phi Beta Kappa, graduation with a summa cum laude degree in psychology, then continuation at Berkeley for her Ph.D.

She’d published her first two papers as a graduate student and moved to L.A. for clinical training: internship and postdoctoral fellowship, crosstown, in the Psychiatry Department at County General Hospital. Then an appointment as a lecturer in women’s studies at the University and a transfer, the following year, to the Psychology Department as an assistant professor.

Next came ten pages of society memberships, scholarly publications, abstracts, papers delivered at conferences. Her first research topic had been differential achievement in girls and boys on mathematics tests, then she’d shifted gears to sex roles and child-rearing methods, and,
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once again, to sex roles as they affected self-control.

An average of five articles a year in solid journals—premium gas for a Ferrari on the tenure fast track. It could have been any C.V., until I came to the tail end of the bibliography section where a subheading entitledNonpeer Review Publication and Media Work gave an inkling of the turn she’d taken during the year before her death.

Wolves and Sheep,along with its foreign editions, followed by scores of radio and TV and print interviews, appearances on afternoon talk shows.

Shows with titles likeFIGHT BACK! Dogging the Predator, The New Slaves, The Testosterone Conspiracy.

The final section wasDepartmental and Campus Activities and it brought things back to dusty academia.

As an assistant professor she’d sat on four committees. Scheduling and Room Allocation, Graduate Student Orientation, Animal-Subject Safety—the kind of drudgery I knew well—then, six months before her death, she’d chaired something called Interpersonal Conduct that I’d never heard of.

Something to do with sexual harassment? Exploitation of students by faculty? That was something with hostility potential. I placed a check next to the notation and moved on toWolves and Sheep.

The book jacket was matte red with embossed gold letters and a small black graphic between author and title: silhouettes of the eponymous animals.

The wolf’s mouth was crammed with fangs and its claws reached out for the undersized sheep.

On the back was Hope Devane’s color photo. She had an oval face and sweet features, wore a beige cashmere suit and pearls and sat very straight in a brown suede chair backed by shelves of books in soft focus. MontBlanc pen in hand, sterling inkwell within reach. Long fingers, pink-polished nails. Honey-blond hair swept back from fine bones, the cheeks accentuated by blush. Light brown eyes clear and wide and direct, soft without being weak. A confident, possibly ironic smile on nacreous lips.

The pages were dog-eared and Milo’s yellow underlining and pen scrawl were all over the margins. I read the book, drove two miles down Beverly Glen and over to the University, where I played with the Biomed library computers for a while.

Interesting results. I returned home, watched the talk-show tapes.

Four shows, four sets of noisy, giddy audiences, a quartet of smarmy, pseudosensitive, and altogether interchangeable hosts.

The Yolanda Michaels Show: What Makes a Real Woman?

Hope Devane tolerating the metal-grind rhetoric of an antifeminist woman who preached the
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virtues of Bible study, cosmetics, and greeting one’s husband at the door in a see-through raincoat over nothing else.

Sid, Live!: Prisoners of Sex?

Hope Devane engaged in debate with a male anthropologist/ant specialist who believed all sex differences were inborn and unchangeable and that men and women should simply learn to live with one another. Hope trying to be reasonable, but the end result falling just short of shallow.

The Gina Sydney Jerome Show:

Hope Devane in a roundtable discussion with three other authors: a woman linguist who pooh-poohed psychology and recommended that men and women learn to interpret language correctly, a New York-based syndicated columnist on women’s issues who had nothing to say but said it polysyllabically, and a depressed-looking man who claimed to have been a battered husband and had stretched the account of his torment to three hundred pages.

Same old noise . . .

Live with Morry Mayhew: Who’s Really the Weaker Sex?

Hope Devane debating the self-styled head of a men’s-rights organization I’d never heard of who went after her with misogynistic lust.

This one different—the hostility level ratcheted up several notches. I rewound and watched it again.

The misogynist was named Karl Neese. Thirty or so, lean and outwardly hip in all black and a stylish haircut but Neanderthal in his point of view, hogging the airtime and layering insults relentlessly—psychodrama parmigiana.

His target never fought back, never interrupted, never raised her voice even when Neese’s comments drew applause from louts in the audience.

MAYHEW: Okay, Mr. Neese, now let’s ask the doctor—

NEESE: Doctor? I don’t see any stethoscope.

MAYHEW: She happens to be a Ph.D.—

NEESE: Am I supposed to be impressed by that? What doesPh.D. mean, anyway? “Piled higher and deeper”? “Papa has dough”?

MAYHEW[Suppressing smile]: Okay, Dr. Devane, now if you could please tell us—

NEESE: Tell us why feminists keep harping on about their problems—nag, nag, nag. But it’s okay to abort on demand because babies are inconvenient—

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MAYHEW:—your theory of why women fall prey so often to unscrupulous—

NEESE: Because theywant unscrupulous. Bad guys. Danger. Excitement. And they keep coming back for more. They say they want nice, but just try to pick up a woman using nice. Nice means weak and weak means geek. And geek gets no peek!

[Laughter, applause]

HOPEDEVANE: You may actually have something there.

NEESE: Oh, I do, baby. I do. [Leering]

DEVANE: Sometimes we do fall into dangerous patterns. The crux, I believe, is in the lessons we learn as children.

NEESE: Show me yours, I’ll show you mine?

MAYHEW: [Smiling] C’mon, Karl. What kinds of lessons, Doctor—

DEVANE: The role models we learn from. The behaviors we’re taught to emulate—

Twenty more minutes of his double entendres and her reasoned statements. Each time he got the crowd hooting, she waited until things quieted before offering brief, precise replies that had nothing to do with him. Sticking to her own agenda. By the end of the show, people were listening and Neese was looking off-balance.

I watched it again, concentrating on Hope and what made her effective. She made eye contact in a fearless way that established intimacy, projected an unflappability that made the obvious seem profound.

Charisma. Calm charisma.

If the medium was the message, she was a brilliant courier and I couldn’t help thinking of what she might have accomplished had she lived.

When the segment ended, the camera caught a close-up of Neese’s face. No more wise-guy grin.

Serious. Angry?

It was a crazy idea, but could he have held on to the anger?

Why not, the case was cold and Milo had asked me to “hypothesize away.” I wrote down Neese’s name and reached for the homicide file.

Words, pictures. Always pictures . . .

It was close to five when I called Milo at West L.A. Detectives and told him I’d finished everything, including the book.

“That was fast.”

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“Easy read, she had a good style. Conversational. As if she’s sitting in your living room, sharing her knowledge.”

“What’d you think of the contents?”

“A lot of what’s in there is hard to argue with—stick up for your rights, take care of yourself, choose your goals realistically so you can succeed and enhance your self-esteem. But when it comes to the more radical stuff she doesn’t present facts to back it up. The part about testosterone and sadistic psychopathy is a pretty big stretch.”

“All men are sex killers.”

“All men have thepotential to be sex killers and even consensual sex is partial rape because the penis is constructed as a weapon and penetration means invasion and loss of women’s control.”

“She’s big on control, isn’t she?”

“It’s her main theme. I went to the library and checked out the studies she quoted. They don’t say what she claims they do. She took facts out of context, reported selectively, played fast and loose. But unless you took the time to carefully examine each source, it wouldn’t be obvious.

And apart from her writing skill, I can see why the book sold so well. She had a natural constituency because women almost alwaysare the victims. You heard Robin last night. When we got home she told me the murder had kept her up nights because she found herself identifying with Hope. I never knew she’d given it a moment’s thought.”

“What about the TV tapes?”

“She was good at that, too. Unflappable. Even when they put that moron against her on Mayhew, she never lost her cool. Remember him?”

“Skinny idiot in black? He really dumped on her, didn’t he?”

“But she handled him beautifully, never let him get to her. To me, she came out the clear winner and he looked mad. What if he held a grudge?”

Silence. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“You said be creative. Those shows are powder kegs—dealing with sensitive issues, exploiting people on the edge. Exactly what I was trained not to do as a therapist. I’ve always thought it was only a matter of time before things got violent.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Okay, I’ll look into him—what was his name?”

“Karl Neese.”

He repeated it. “Wouldn’tthat be something. . . . Okay, any other thoughts about Hope?”

“That’s it, so far. How about you?”

“Nothing. I get a feeling Hubby’s holding something back and your buddies at the U are no
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help—quoting me statistics about how if it takes too long to solve a case, forget it. Also, they treat me like Joe Cretin. Talk-ing re-al slo-ow.”

“Class snobbery?”

“Maybe coming in rubbing my knuckles on the ground while scarfing a banana was the wrong approach.”

I laughed. “You should have dropped your master’s degree into the conversation.”

“Oh, sure, that would really impress a bunch of Ph.D.’s. So what do you think of the wounds?

Does that groin stab make it sexual?”

“If it was intentional, it would show definite sexual hostility.”

“Oh, it was intentional all right. Three clean cuts, no error wounds, no hacking around. He got her exactly where he wanted: heart, groin, back.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds orchestrated,” I said. “A definite sequence.”

“How so?”

“Stabbing her in the heart first could be romantic, in a sick sense. Breaking someone’s heart, maybe some kind of revenge. Though I guess he could have chosen the heart in order to kill her quickly. But wouldn’t a throat slash have been a better bet for that?”

“Definitely. The heart’s not that easy to hit, you can nick ribs, miss completely. Most quick-kill knife jobsare throat slashes. What about the other wounds?”

“The groin,” I said, thinking of Hope’s composure and impeccable clothes. Every hair in place.

Left bleeding on the street. . . . “The groin could be an extension of the heart wound—love gone wrong, the sexual element. . . . If so, the back would be the coup de grÂce: back stabbing. The symbol of betrayal.”

“To stab her in the back,” he said, “he had to take the time to flip her over and place her on her stomach. That’s why I got interested when you said orchestrated. Think of it, you’re standing there on the street, just killed someone. You take the time to do something like that? Tome it says crime of passion but carried out in a calculated manner.”

“Cold rage,” I said. “Criminal intimacy—someone she knew?”

“Which is exactly why I’m interested in Hubby.”

“But for someone like her, intimacy could mean something totally different. Her book tour took her out in front of millions of people. She could have triggered rage in any of them. Even a delusional rage. Someone who didn’t like the way she signed a book, someone who watched her on TV and related to it pathologically. Fame’s like stripping in a dark theater, Milo. You never know who’s out there.”

He was silent for a few moments.

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“Gee, thanks for expanding my suspect list to infinity. . . . Here’s something that never made it into the papers: Her routine was to take a half-hour to one-hour walk every night, around the same time. Ten-thirty, eleven. Usually she walked with her dog—a Rottweiler—but that day it came down with serious stomach problems and spent the night at the vet’s. Convenient, huh?”

“Poisoned?”

“I called the vet this morning and he said he never worked the dog up ’cause it got better by morning, but the symptoms could have been consistent with eating something nasty. On the other hand, he said dogs eat garbage all the time.”

“Did this one?”

“Not that he knew. And it’s too late now to run tests. Something else Paz and Fellows never thought to ask about.”

“Poisoning the dog,” I said. “Someone watching her for a while, learning her habits.”

“Or someone who already knew them. Wouldn’t a husband fit perfectly into this love-sex-revenge orchestration thing? Someone who’d been cuckolded?”

“Had this husband been cuckolded?”

“Don’t know. But assume yes. And if Seacrest was smarter than the average betrayed husband, colder, what better way to deflect suspicion than make it look like a street crime?”