Rage

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “You know about shrinks.”

  “Crazy nuts.”

  “Shrinks are for crazy nuts.”

  “Hnnh.”

  “Who told you that, Rand?”

  “Gram.”

  “Your grandmother.”

  “Hnnh.”

  “What else did she say about shrinks?”

  “If I didn’t do right she’d send me.”

  “To a shrink.”

  “Hnnh.”

  “What does ‘do right’ mean?”

  “Bein’ good.”

  “How long ago did your grandmother tell you that?”

  He thought about that, seemed to be really working at figuring it out. Gave up and stared at his knees.

  “Was it after you were in jail or before?”

  “Before.”

  “Was your grandmother angry at you when she said it?”

  “Kinda.”

  “What made her angry?”

  His grainy skin reddened. “Stuff.”

  “Stuff,” I said.

  No answer.

  “Has Gram been to see you, here?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How often does she come?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “She have anything else to say?”

  Silence.

  “Nothing?” I said.

  “She brang me to eat.”

  “What’s she bring you?”

  “Oreos,” he said. “She’s mad.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I ruined it.”

  “Ruined what?”

  “Everything.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  His eyes fluttered. The lids dropped. “My sin.”

  “Your sin.”

  “Killing that baby.” He lay back down, flung an arm over his eyes.

  “You feel bad about that,” I said.

  No answer.

  “Killing the baby,” I prompted.

  He rolled away from me, faced the wall.

  “How do you feel about what happened to the baby, Rand?”

  Several seconds passed.

  “Rand?”

  “He laughed.”

  “Who laughed?”

  “Troy.”

  “Troy laughed.”

  “Hnnh.”

  “When?”

  “When he hit her.”

  “Troy laughed when he hit Kristal.”

  Silence.

  “Did Troy do anything else to Kristal?”

  He was inert for nearly a minute, then rolled back toward me. His eyelids lifted halfway. Licked his lips.

  “This is tough to talk about,” I said.

  Small nod.

  “What else did Troy do to the baby?”

  Sitting up with the stiff, labored movements of an old man, he encircled his own neck with his hands and pantomimed choking. More than mime; his eyes widened, his face turned scarlet, his tongue thrust forward.

  I said, “Troy choked the baby.”

  His knuckles whitened as he squeezed harder.

  “That’s enough, Rand.”

  He began to rock as his fingers dug into his flesh. I got up, pried his hands loose. Strong kid; it took some doing. He gasped, made a retching sound, flopped back down. I stood by his side until his breathing slowed. He drew his knees up toward his chest. Pressure marks splotched his neck.

  I made a note to request suicide watch. “Don’t do that again, Rand.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You feel bad about what happened to the baby.”

  No response.

  “You watched Troy choke and hit the baby and thinking about it makes you feel really bad.”

  Someone’s radio spat a hip-hop number. Footsteps from afar sounded but no one approached.

  I said, “You feel bad about watching Troy.”

  He mumbled.

  “What’s that, Rand?”

  His lips moved soundlessly.

  “What, Rand?”

  The deputy who’d escorted me strolled by, scanned the cell, and moved on. Fifteen minutes hadn’t passed. The staff was taking special care.

  “Rand?”

  He said, “I hit her, too.”

  * * *

  For the next week, I saw him every day for two hourly sessions, once in the morning, once in the afternoon. Instead of opening up, he regressed, refusing to divulge anything more about the murder. Much of my time was devoted to formal testing. The clinical interview was a challenge. Some days he remained resolutely mute; the most I could hope for were passive, monosyllabic answers to yes-no questions.

  When I brought up the abduction, he seemed confused about why he’d participated, more stunned than horrified. Part of that was denial, but I suspected his low intellect was also a factor. When you comb through the histories of seriously violent kids, you often find head injuries. I wondered about the crash that had killed his parents but had spared him obvious damage.

  His Wechsler Intelligence scores were no shock: Full Score I.Q. of 79, with severe deficits in verbal reasoning, language formation, factual knowledge, and mathematical logic.

  Tom Laskin wanted to know if he’d been functioning as an adult when he killed Kristal Malley. Even if Rand was thirty-five years old, that might’ve been a relevant question.

  The T.A.T. and the Rorschach were pretty much useless: He was too depressed and intellectually impoverished to produce meaningful responses to the cards. His Peabody I.Q. score was no higher than the more verbally influenced Wechsler. His Draw-a-Person was a tiny, limbless, stick figure with two strands of hair and no mouth. My request to free-draw elicited a blank stare. When I suggested he draw himself and Troy he resisted by feigning sleep.

  “Just draw anything, then.”

  He lay there, breathing through his mouth. His acne had grown even worse. Suggesting a dermatologic consult would have elicited smirks from the jail staff.

  “Rand?”

  “Hnnh.”

  “Draw something.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  His mouth twisted as if his teeth hurt. “Can’t.”

  “Sit up and do it, anyway.” My hard tone made him blink. He stared at me but couldn’t hold it past a few seconds. Pitiful attention span. Maybe part of that was sensory deprivation due to being locked up, but my guess was he’d always had trouble concentrating.

  I handed him the pencil and the paper and the drawing board. He sat there for a while, finally put the board in his lap, gripped the pencil. The point froze on the paper.

  “Draw,” I said.

  His hand began circling lazily, floating above the paper. Finally making contact, as he created flabby, barely visible, concentric ellipses. The page began to fill. Darker ellipses. His eyes shut as he scrawled. For two weeks he’d done that a lot— blinding himself to his hellish reality.

  Today, his pencil hand moved faster. The ellipses grew more angular. Flatter, darker. Sharpening to jagged, spearlike shapes.

  He kept going, tongue tip snaking between his lips. The paper became a storm of black. His free hand fisted and gathered the hem of his jail shirt as his drawing hand moved faster. The pencil dug in and the page puckered. Ripped. He slashed downward. Circled faster. Digging in harder, as the paper shredded. The pencil went through to the drawing board, hit the glossy, fiberboard surface and slid out from his hand.

  Landing on the floor of the cell.

  He moved quickly, retrieved it. Exhaled. Held the yellow nub in a grubby, moist palm. “Sorry.”

  The paper was confetti. The pencil’s graphite tip had broken off, leaving behind splintered wood. Sharp little spikes.

  I took the pencil. Put it in my pocket.

  * * *

  After my final visit, walking to the subterranean parking lot, I heard someone call my name and turned to see a heavy woman in a flowered dress leaning on an aluminum cane. The dirty-milk sky matched her complexion
. I’d awakened to sunny blue Beverly Glen firmament, but cheer had eluded the grimy corner of East L.A. dominated by the jail.

  She took a few steps toward me and the cane clunked on pavement. “You’re the psychologist, right? I’m Rand’s gram.”

  I walked to her, held out my hand.

  “Margaret Sieff,” she said, in a smoker’s voice. Her free arm remained at her side. The dress was a scratchy-looking cotton print, relenting at the seams. Camellias and lilies and delphiniums and greenery sprawled across an aqua background. Her hair was white, short, curly, thinning so severely that patches of pink scalp shone through. Blue eyes took me in. Small, sharp, searching eyes. Nothing like her grandson’s.

  “You been here all week but I never heard from you. You don’ figger to talk to me?”

  “I plan to when I’m finished evaluating Rand.”

  “Evaluatin’.” The word seemed to distress her. “What you figger you can do for him?”

  “I’ve been asked by Judge Laskin to— ”

  “I know all that,” she said. “You’re supposed to say was he a kid or an aldult. Ain’t that cristo clear? What I’m askin’ is what can you do for him?”

  “What’s crystal clear, Mrs. Sieff?”

  “The boy’s dumb. Screwy.” She pinged her waxy forehead with an index finger. “Din’t talk till he was four, still don’t talk so good.”

  “You’re saying Rand’s— ”

  “I’m saying Randolph ain’t never gonna be no aldult.”

  Which was as good a diagnosis as the jargon in my notes.

  Behind her, rising above both of us, the concrete grid of the jail was the world’s largest window shade. “You coming or going, ma’am?”

  “My appointment’s not for a coupla hours. With the buses from the Valley it’s hard to figger, so I get here early. ’Cause if I’m late, those bastards don’ lemme in at all.”

  “How about a cup of coffee?”

  “You payin’?”

  “I am.”

  “Then, fine.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Jails spread a very specific commercial rash, a trickle-down of cheap lawyers, bail-bond outfits, translation services, fast-food joints. I knew of a hamburger stand nearby but the walk through the parking lot was too much for Margaret Sieff’s stiff legs. She waited by the entrance as I pulled up in my car. When I got out to open her door, she said, “Fancy-dancy caddy. Must be nice being rich.”

  My Seville’s a ’79, with a rebuilt engine. At that time it was well into its third vinyl roof, and a second paint job was already losing the battle with corrosive air. I took her cane and braced her elbow as she struggled to get in. When she finally settled, she said, “How much they payin’ you to evaluate?”

  I said, “That’s not your concern, ma’am.”

  That made her smile.

  * * *

  I drove to the burger joint, set her up at an outdoor table, went inside, and waited in line behind a motorcycle cop who’d outgrown his tailored shirt, an A.D.A. who looked fifteen, and a pair of scruffy, mustachioed guys with faded gang tattoos. Those two paid with coins and it took awhile for the kid behind the counter to do the math. When I finally reached the front, I ordered two cardboard-flavored coffees.

  When I returned to Margaret Sieff, she said, “I’m hungry.” I went back in and got her a cheeseburger.

  She snatched the food from me, ate ravenously, made token attempts at daintiness— quick dabs of paper napkin on mottled chin— before returning to her spirited attack. “That hit the spot,” she said, scraping ketchup onto a finger and licking it off. “I tell you, sometimes I could eat five a those.”

  “What do you want to tell me about Rand?”

  “Other than him being a dummy?”

  “Must’ve been hard raising him.”

  “Everything’s hard,” she said. “Raising his mama was hard.”

  “Your daughter had problems.”

  “Tricia was a dummy, just like him. So was that fool she went and married. It was his fault they got killed. All those speeding tickets and his drinking. So they give him a truck.” She laughed. “Idjits. That’s who they give a truck to.”

  I said, “Tricia had trouble in school.”

  Her glare said she was starting to doubt my intelligence. “That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She sighed. “When she even bothered to go to school, she hated reading, hated ‘rithmetic, hated everything. We were in Arizona back then and mostly she snuck away and ran around the desert with bad influences.”

  “Where in Arizona?”

  Instead of answering, she said, “It was hot as hell. My husband’s big idea, he was gonna grow cactuses because he heard you could make big money growing cactuses and selling ’em to tourists. ‘Be easy, Margie, no water, just keep ’em in pots till they’re big enough.’ Yeah, and make sure the dog don’t eat ’em and die from spikes in the guts, then you have to set up a stand on the highway and breathe all that heat and dust and hope some tourist’ll bother to stop.”

  She gave her empty cup another glance. “I sat at that stand day after day, watching people speed right by me. People going somewhere.”

  She pouted. “Guess what? Even cactus need water.”

  She held out her cup. I got her a refill.

  “So Tricia grew up in Arizona,” I said.

  “And Nevada and Oklahoma and before that we lived in Waco, Texas, and before that southern Indiana. So what? This ain’t about where we lived. It’s about Randolph and the bad thing he did.” She pressed forward against the table, bosom settling on grease-spotted blue plastic.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s talk about that.”

  Her lips folded inward, tugging her nose downward. Her blue eyes had darkened to granite pebbles. “I told him don’t be hanging with that little monster. Now, all our lives is turned to shit.”

  “Troy Turner.”

  “Mister, I don’t even want to hear that name. Sinful monster, I knew he’d get Randolph in trouble.” She finished the refill, squeezed the cup and folded it over, placed her hand over the misshapen wad. Her mouth trembled. “Didn’t think it would be trouble like this.”

  “What scared you about Troy?”

  “Me? I weren’t scareda that little shit. I was worried. For Randolph. ’Cause he’s stupid, does whatever you tell him.”

  “Is Troy stupid?”

  “He’s evil. You wanna do somethin’ useful, sir? Tell the judge that without bad influence Randolph never woulda— never coulda done anything like this. And that’s all I’m gonna say about it ’cause Randolph’s lawyer said you weren’t necessarily on our side.”

  “I’m on no one’s side, Mrs. Sieff. The judge appointed me so that I could— ”

  “The judge is against us, we were some rich nigger it would be different,” she snapped. “And from where I’m sittin’, what you’re doin’s a waste of time and money. ’Cause Randolph don’t have a chance, he’s gonna get sent somewhere. Could be an aldult jail or could be someplace with little monsters.”

  She shrugged. Her eyes were wet and she swiped them angrily. “Same difference. He ain’t gettin’ out for a long, long time and my life’s turned to shit.”

  “Do you think he should be released?”

  “Why not?”

  “He murdered a two-year-old girl.”

  “The monster did it,” she said. “Randolph was just too stupid not to get outta there.”

  Her grandson had told me otherwise.

  “You want blame,” she said, “there’s plenty to go around. What kinda mother is that, leaving a baby all alone? They should be puttin’ her on trial, too.”

  I fought to remain expressionless. Must’ve failed, because she held out a palm. “Hey, I ain’t sayin’ it was all her fault. I’m sayin’ everything should be . . . considered. ’Cause everything had to be movin’ together for it to happen, know what I mean? Like all the astrology signs being in place. Like all
the pieces in the puzzle fittin’ together.”