Sweet.
Perfect.
Being tied down.
She knew what that felt like.
Though she'd never tell Tessa.
Empathy had its limits.
Ronald Oster was too young to be that cynical. Maybe twenty-eight, with kinky flame-red hair and rampant freckles, he was soft around the middle and wore a vested blue suit one size too small.
I met him outside the county jail, off to one side, near the long line of women that forms every morning, waiting to visit prisoners. Some of the women looked at us but Oster paid them no notice as he gave me a long, hard look and kept smoking his British Oval.
'So why'd you change your mind?' he said.
'My own lawyer said you could force me. As long as I'm going to waste my time, I might as well get paid.'
He kept staring at me.
'Speaking of which,' I said, 'my fee's three hundred seventy-five dollars per hour, portal-to-portal. I'll send you the bill and expect you to get it paid within thirty days. I also expect a contract from you to that effect within three days.'
I handed him my business card.
'So it's the money,' he said, thumbing his vest pocket.
'I'd rather not do it at all but if I have to, it sure isn't for the love of your client.'
He pressed the flat cigarette between his fingers. 'Let's get one thing clear, Doctor. From this point on if you work for anyone on this case, it's for my client. Anything he says to you as well as anything I say to you about him falls under the purview of therapeutic confidentiality. Including this conversation.'
'Once we have an agreement.'
'We do. Though in terms of payment, I'm a civil servant. All I can do is go through channels.'
'Do your best - and one other exception. If your client threatens me in any way, it'll fall under Tarasoff and I'll report it immediately.'
That threw him, but he smiled. 'Tarasoff applies to threats against third parties.'
'No one says it can't apply to the therapist.'
'I sense hostility, Doctor.'
'Self-preservation.'
'Why would my client threaten you?'
'They say he's murdered several times. I'm just talking theoretically, to make sure we're clear about the rules.'
'Do you get this clear with every attorney you work for?'
'I don't work much for attorneys.'
'I've heard you do lots of child-custody work.'
'When I do, I work for the court.'
'I see... so you're afraid of Mr Muscadine. Why?'
'I have no specific fear of him but I'm careful. Let's say I don't come to the conclusions he wants me to. If he has murdered all those people, it's an indication he doesn't take well to disappointment.'
'Disappointment?' He flicked away the cigarette. 'That's a mild way to describe loss of a vital organ.'
I looked at my watch.
He said, 'Essentially, the man was raped, Dr Delaware.'
'How does he claim it happened?'
'I'll let him tell you that. If I let him talk to you at all. Even if I don't, you'll get the contract and a check for your time today.'
'Meaning I already belong to you and can't cooperate voluntarily with the police.'
He smiled.
'Fine,' I said, looking at my watch again. 'Far as I'm concerned, the less I have to do with any of this the better.'
He hooked a thumb in his vest. The line of waiting women inched past us.
'This,' he said, 'may not work out.'
'Up to you.'
'I'm interested in your professional opinion because I think it's a clear case of mental anguish - like what battered wives go through. But I'm not sure, given your history with the police, that you'll render an impartial opinion.'
'If I get data, I'll render. If you want someone you can play ventriloquist with, I'm not your man.'
He looked at my card. 'I hear a clear prosecution bias.'
'Have it your way.'
'You don't lean toward the other side?' he said.
'I keep an open mind. If you want a whore, drive down Hollywood Boulevard and flash a twenty.'
His freckles deepened in color and the skin between them turned pink. He gave a deep laugh. "That's good, I like that. Okay, you're my guy. Because his mental anguish is so obvious even you'll see it. And getting someone like you to testify to that will be all the more impressive. A police consultant.'
He held out his hand and we shook. Some of the women in line watched and I could only imagine what they were thinking.
'Let's go meet Reed,' he said. 'And don't worry, he can't hurt you.'
'Therapy,' said Muscadine, smiling and flipping his long hair. 'Quite a luxury for a starving actor.'
'Ever had any therapy?' I said.
'Just the mind games they put you through in acting class. Probably should've, though.'
'Why's that?'
'My obvious emotional problems. Which is what you're here to establish, right?'
'I want to know as much as I can about you, Reed.'
'That's kind of flattering.' He smiled and flipped his hair again. He was in street clothes - a black T-shirt and jeans - but behind glass. A few days of incarceration hadn't hurt his looks, and his muscles were still huge and well-defined. Push-ups in the cell, probably. He was big enough to defend himself.
The deputy in the corner of the visiting room turned toward us. Muscadine smiled at him, too, and he showed Muscadine a khaki back.
'How are they treating you?' I asked.
'Not bad, so far. Of course, I'm a model prisoner.
No reason not to be - shall I tell you about my mother? She really was a piece of work.'
'Eventually,' I said. 'But first, tell me about your love for animals.'
The smile left his face and returned, stiffer. I could hear a director shout, 'Loosen up, go with the feeling, Reed!'
'Well,' he said, crossing his legs, 'they do love me.'
'I know. The reason I'm asking is the day I visited you I noticed how well you got along with Mrs Green's bullmastiff.'
'Samantha and I are good buddies.'
'Mrs Green said Samantha's very protective of her.'
'She is.'
'But not around you.'
'I lived there,' he said. 'I belonged. But yes, you're right. I do have a special rapport with animals. Probably 'cause they sense I'm at ease with them.'
'Did you have lots of pets as a child?'
'No,' he said. 'Mom?
'She wouldn't let you have any?'
He shook his head. 'Never.' White-toothed snarl/smile. 'Mom was an extremely neat woman.'
'And after you left home - how old were you, by the way?'
'College. Eighteen.'
'Ever return home?'
'Not a chance. I-'
'Did you get any pets once you were living on your own?'
'Couldn't. The places I rented wouldn't let me. Then my job got in the way.'
'Accounting.'
He nodded. 'The old nine-to-five. It wasn't fair to leave an animal alone all day. When I went back to school and got serious about acting, same thing. I did do some work as a groomer for a while.' 'Really?'
'Yeah, just for a few months, one of those mobile van things. One of the many things I did in order to pursue my craft.' 'Starving actor.'
'Yes, I know I'm a clich‚, but so what?' 'So am I, I guess. L.A. shrink.' He chuckled.
'So,' I said. 'Grooming must have increased your skills with animals.'
'Definitely. You learn how to touch them, how to speak to them. With animals, ninety-nine percent is nonverbal communication. You feel right about yourself, they'll feel right about you. And working with them, you learn to read them.'
'To know which ones are hostile, which are friendly?' 'Exactly.'
'Nonverbal,' I said. 'Interesting. Was Hope Devane's Rottweiler easy to read?'
He looked at his feet. Flipped his hair. 'We're going to get right into it?' 'Any reaso
n not to?'
'I don't know,' he said. 'Oster says I should talk freely to you, but he's just a P.D.' 'You don't have confidence in him?' 'He seems fine, but...' 'You don't trust him?'
'Sure I do. Twenty feet farther than I can throw him.' Another white-toothed grin. 'Which is about fifteen feet more than I'd trust most lawyers - actually, he's smarter than I expected from a civil servant. And what's my choice? I am a starving actor.'
I jotted down notes, looked back up at him.
'The Rottweiler,' I said. 'How'd you handle her -she was a bitch, wasn't she?'
"Very much so.' Smile. 'Gave her some meat sprinkled with paregoric'
'Through the gate?'
He nodded.
'She just took it from you?'
'Just like that,' he said. 'Amazingly easy. Because I'd driven and walked by the house when she was out in the yard and she barked plenty. But she must have smelled the meat because the minute I started up the lawn, she quieted. And by the time I got to the gate, she was sitting there with her tongue out. Lapped it up.'
'Was this during the day or at night?'
'At night. Maybe eight o'clock.'
'The night Professor Devane was killed?' Use the passive tense, keep him at ease...
Nod.
'Was anyone home?' I said.
'They both were.' Big smile. 'That was the beauty of it. The street was so dark, those big trees, no one walking. I leaned my bike against the tree, walked up their front lawn, gave the meat to the dog, and just rode away.'
Long silence.
Finally, he said, 'So easy.'
I nodded. 'You came back later?'
'Yes.'
'When?'
'Around ten.'
'Because that was the time of her nightly walk.'
The smile dropped off. 'She walked between 10:30 and 11:30. Same route, black sweats one night, gray the next. Black, gray, black, gray. Like a machine. I didn't know if she'd walk without the dog or call it off. But she did - does that tell you the kind of person she was? The poor Rottie's barfing its guts out and she just goes about her routine? If-she'd veered off-schedule, who knows, I might never have gone through with it.'
'Really?'
He stared at me. Broke into the widest grin yet. 'Nah, eventually it would have happened.'
'In the script, huh?'
He looked down at his feet again. 'Yes, that's a good way to put it.'
'If you don't mind, let's back up a bit, Reed.'
'To what?'
'Mandy Wright.'
'Mandy who?'
I smiled, crossed my legs. 'She bothers you? More than Devane?'
'No.' He exhaled. 'What do you want to know?'
'Tell me what happened. How she set you up.'
He cracked his knuckles loud enough for the deputy to turn around. Flipped his hair, combed his fingers through it, let it cascade around his handsome face and flipped it once more.
The deputy turned again, frowned, faced the wall.
Muscadine said, 'Whew...'
'Still hard to talk about,' I said.
'Yeah... you hit the nail on the head. The basic issue is the setup. That fucking committee hearing.'
'The blood test'
'Exactly. Devane hated my guts for whatever reason, must have decided right then to harvest me. Incredible, isn't it? like a bad dream - for months I was walking around in a nightmare.'
'Tell me about it.'
'The nightmare?'
'Everything. Starting with Mandy.'
'Mandy,' he said. 'Mandy the working cunt. She told me her name was Desiree.'
'Did you know her before you met at Club None?'
'No, but I knew hundreds like her.'
'How?'
'L.A. woman,' he said. 'like that Doors song.'
'Did she pick you up?'
'In retrospect, she must have. At the time I thought I was picking her up.'
'Where?'
'Club None.'
'You go there often?'
'Once a week or so. I was taking some night acting classes in Brentwood, used to drive home on Sunset. Sometimes I dropped in and had a beer. They must have been watching me. Stalking me.'
He started to cry, covered his face. 'Shit,' he said through gigantic fingers. 'To be prey - the violation.'
'Spooky,' I said.
'Sickening.'
He looked up. I nodded.
'The degradation,' he said. "They cheapened me. I wouldn't treat a dog that way.'
I let him compose himself. 'So you went into Club None and saw Mandy - Desiree - and-'
'She was at the bar, we made eye contact, she smiled, bent over, showed me her tits. Luscious tits. I went over, sat down, chatted her up, we moved to a table. I bought her a drink, had myself another beer, we talked. Next thing her hand's on my knee, and she's saying let's go back to my place.' Smiling. 'It's happened to me before.'
'Did you go to her place?'
'We never got there. She must have slipped something in my beer 'cause the last thing I remember is getting into my car and then... God, I still can't believe they fucked me like that!' Big shoulders shook. Acting? Maybe, maybe not. 'Then what, Reed?'
'Then I woke up in an alley a block from my house with the goddamnedest pain in my back and the stink of garbage in my nose.' 'What time?'
'Around four a.m., it was still dark. I could hear rats, smell the garbage - they dumped me like garbage!' I shook my head. 'Unbelievable.' 'Kafka. I tried to get up, couldn't. My back was starting to hurt like hell. A throubbing, dull pain, right over my hip bone. And it felt tight, really tight, as if I was being squeezed. I reached around, touched something - gauze. I'd been wrapped. Like a mummy.
Then my arm started throbbing, too, and I managed to roll up my sleeve and saw a black-and-blue mark - a needle stick.'
He touched his inner elbow.
'At first I thought someone had screwed with my head, too - given me dope, though I couldn't figure out why. Later I realized it was the anesthesia. I was woozy, nauseous, started to throw up, heaved my guts for a long time. Finally, I managed to stand, made it to my apartment somehow and collapsed. Slept all day. When I woke up, I was still in the dream and the pain was unbearable and I knew I had a fever. I drove myself to the free clinic and the doctor took off the bandage and this look came on his face. Like how can you be walking around? Then he told me, you've been operated on, man. Don't you remember? I started to freak out, he held up a mirror so I could see the stitches. Like a fucking football.'
He played with his hair some more, rubbed his eyes, shook his head.
'Oh, man. It was like... you have no idea. No idea, the violation. Fritz Lang, Hitchcock. This hippie doctor's telling me I've had surgery and I'm saying no way. He must have thought I was nuts.'
'Hitchcock,' I said.
'The classic plot line: innocent man gets caught up. Only the star hadn't been told. The star had been improvised on.'
'Horrible,' I said.
'Beyond horror - splatter cinema. Then I started to remember things. Desiree - Mandy. Us getting into my car, her leaning over to me, kissing. Jamming her tongue down my throat. Then fade to black. Boom.' He put the palm of one hand over his eyes. 'The free clinic doctor's saying calm down, man, you've got a fever, better check into the hospital.'
'Did the doctor say what kind of operation you'd had?' I asked.
'He asked me if I'd had kidney disease and when I said no, what the hell are you talking about, he took an X ray. And told me. That's when he said I should be in the hospital'
'Did you check yourself in?'
'With what? I don't have insurance.'
'What about County?'
'No,' he said. 'Place is a zoo... and I didn't want any more documentation. I didn't want to go anywhere. Because I was already thinking.'
'About getting back at them?'
Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 11 - The Clinic Page 38
