Faye Kellerman - Decker 11 - Jupiter's Bones

by Jupiter's Bones

  Decker said, 'Why'd you ask me about football, Doctor?'

  'I don't really know why.' A pause. 'Maybe because my father liked football'

  'Did he play?'

  'I don't know. Shows you how close we were.'

  'But you know he liked the game.'

  'He'd watch the big games - the Rose Bowl and the Super Bowl. When I was real little, I'd sit with him, although I never understood all the rules.'

  Decker smiled. 'No one does. We're all faking it.'

  Another weak, fleeting smile. Her eyes were tired and sad.

  'So when you were little,' Decker said, 'you watched the games with your dad?'

  'The Rose Bowl mostly. It was a New Year's Day tradition. Once, when my brothers were just babies, he took me down to his office in the university. Just me. I remember watching the parade from his vantage point on the sixth floor. That building is long gone since they put up the Space Sciences Center. But back then, we saw everything. The visibility was amazing. After the parade, we watched the game on TV.'

  'Nice memories.'

  'One of the few.'

  'It stayed with you all these years.'

  'Yes, it did.'

  'Guided you through some pretty dark times.'

  She regarded his face. 'You're not the type to play shrink. Exactly why are you here, Lieutenant?'

  'Tying up some loose ends,' Decker said.

  'What kind of "loose ends" are you talking about?'

  'After the destruction of the Order, I was given some time off. Not that much time, but enough to poke my nose into other people's business-'

  'What does that mean?'

  She had turned testy. He felt she knew what was coming.

  'Does the name Harrison ring a bell?' Decker asked.

  She continued to stare at him, then averted her eyes.

  Decker said, 'Remember we told you about the Order's chicken ranch... which I guess is yours now. Anyway, Benton, the farmhand who we initially had questioned for Nova's murder, used to work at Harrison. Matter of fact, that's how your father met him. According to Benton, he just showed up one day.'

  She didn't answer.

  'It's now a halfway house,' Decker continued. 'But during the Regan/Bush years, it was used as a community mental health facility after most of the major psychiatric hospitals had been shut down because inpatient funding had dried up. Harrison was cheap to run. Back then, it had some live-in mental patients. And since it was given federal grants for rehab work, it generated all kinds of paperwork.'

  Her shoulders stooped further. 'Can you cut to the chase, Lieutenant?'

  'The current administrator is a woman named Florine Vesquelez. She's worked there for over twenty years, and is very organized with the files. She allowed me to peek at some of the past cases. Guess whose name showed up as an inpatient resident?'

  She sighed. 'Keith Muldoony.'

  'Any idea who the real Keith Muldoony was?'

  'Haven't a clue.'

  'It's Pluto.'

  'Oh.' She scratched her nose. 'That makes sense.'

  'Was it Pluto's idea to register your father in Harrison s care under the name Muldoony?'

  'Beats me. At the time, I was kept totally in the dark.'

  Decker nodded.

  Europa sighed with resignation. 'You don't believe me. That I had nothing to do with it.' A shrug. 'Well, sir, that's your problem.'

  Decker thought a moment. 'Doctor, can you ride this one out

  with me?'

  'Do I have a choice?'

  'You can tell me to leave,' he answered. 'I have no legal right to be here.'

  She regarded his face. 'You did this all this poking around on your own?'

  'Yep.'

  'And you want nothing from me?'

  'Pardon?'

  She was quiet.

  Decker smiled, but he was disturbed. 'You think I'm trying to blackmail you, Doctor?'

  'Are you?'

  'Is that what Pluto did?'

  She was quiet.

  Decker said, 'I'm just a curious fellow with time on my hands. What we say goes no further than this room.'

  'I'm supposed to believe you?'

  'Well, Doctor, if you don't, that's your problem.'

  She smiled weakly. 'Go on. Get it over with.'

  'First off, I'm wondering how Pluto convinced you to bring your dad back to Los Angeles from West Virginia.'

  'He didn't convince me of anything. I told you I had no idea what was going on. Bringing Daddy back to L.A. was all my mother's doing.'

  'Your mother brought your dad back?'

  'Yes, although I didn't know it at the time.'

  'Why would your mother suddenly bring your father back to Los Angeles? I'm assuming she was the one who committed him to that tiny mental hospital in West Viriginia in the first place.'

  'I assume.'

  'To get him out of the way.'

  'More like to keep him out of public view. Prevent him from making himself a total object of ridicule. When in fact he was an object of pity.'

  'So why would she risk exposing what she'd been trying desperately to hide.'

  'I don't know why, Lieutenant. And Mom's dead. So I guess we'll never really know why.'

  Decker was silent.

  Europa said, 'Again, this isn't firsthand knowledge. But I think Pluto threatened to expose Dad's mental problems if she didn't cooperate.'

  'Ah!' Decker nodded. 'So I wasn't far off. Blackmail was Pluto's kind of thing.'

  'I'm sure you're right.'

  'You must have been angry at your mother when you found out the truth. That your father hadn't disappeared, but was wasting away as a mental patient.'

  'A bit miffed.' But her expression spoke of fury, not of irritation. She got up from her desk chair and went over to the coffeepot. 'You like yours black, right?'

  'Good memory.'

  She took out the coffee urn and began busying herself in mundanity. 'Actually, I didn't talk to her for a long time. So in a sense, there were years when both my parents were lost to me. Then afterward... a long time afterward... when I saw firsthand who or what my father really was... I began to calm down.'

  She poured water into the machine.

  'I started putting myself in Mom's place. During Dad's disappearance...'

  She made quote signs with her fingers at the word disappearance.

  'During his disappearance, Mom was still being honored as the wife of Dr Emil Euler Ganz. Southwest was still paying her a stipend, which helped care for her three children. After all, no one had really known what had happened to Dad. And he had received threatening letters over the years. So foul play didn't seem out of the question.'

  'Like those letters in the newspaper after he died?'

  'I suppose. Although as a child, I never read the contents. But I knew that they existed.'

  'So that thing you told me about your mother hiring detectives was a lie?'

  'No, she did hire detectives to keep up the pretense.' She smiled.

  'None of them found Dad because Mom had done a remarkable job of hiding him. West Virginia is a long way from Los Angeles. Since he was an inpatient, he didn't generate any paper trails. And, I imagine, he was either too crazy or too zonked out to reveal his true identity to anyone. He was truly lost to the world for years... until Pluto came along.'

  'Your mom should have hired me. I could have found him.'

  Europa managed a moribund chuckle. 'I believe you.'

  Decker thought a moment. 'I guess your mom didn't want to lose the few benefits left in her marriage.'

  'Exactly.' She nodded. 'She had already lost Dad to insanity. Why lose everything?'

  'Then Pluto discovered your dad's true identity while working there as an orderly.'

  She turned on the machine and the coffee began gurgling. 'They say that mental patients are always pretending to be people in famous professions. Even if Dad had said he'd been a famous scientist, I doubt most of the workers would have believed him. B
ut somehow Pluto had seen the truth. He must have been perceptive on some level.'

  'Extremely perceptive and extremely crafty. So when he told your mother to bring Dad back to L.A. she cooperated.'

  'She must have.'

  'Whose idea was it to bring your father specifically to Harrison? Hers or Pluto's?'

  'Don't know.'

  'And your mother had your father committed there at Pluto's behest?'

  'You saw the records, you must know the details better than I do.'

  'Under the name Keith Muldoony.'

  She shrugged.

  Decker said, 'That's the name you found him under.'

  'This is true.'

  'And all of this was kept secret from you.'

  'Kept secret from me, kept secret from the world.' She poured him a cup of coffee. Decker formulated ideas as he sipped the black goo.

  She took a swallow and said, 'What's wrong?'

  'I don't know a thing about West Virginia law. I know in California, it's hard to have a person committed without his or her permission.'

  'Maybe Dad had himself committed voluntarily?'

  'Doesn't sound like your father.'

  'No, it doesn't. But perhaps Mom had been medicating him to keep him quiet.'

  Her reasoning made sense. Decker said, 'And after your mother committed your dad to Harrison, Pluto never contacted Mom again?'

  'Not that I know of.'

  'No contact until he called you up anonymously and told you about this man named Keith Muldoony over at Harrison, claiming to be the great scientist Dr Emil Euler Ganz.'

  'It came in a letter actually.'

  'On your twenty-first birthday.'

  This time, Europa' s mouth dropped open. She shut it quickly. 'You certainly did your homework.'

  'No, I just figured that Pluto had contacted you the moment you reached your majority.'

  'Ah!' She nodded. 'Yes, of course. That would be the whole point. My being old enough to take responsibility for my father.'

  Decker said, 'Because your mom had refused to have your father released to her care.'

  She was silent.

  He said, 'Did you show the letter to your mother?'

  'Yes.' A long pause. 'She became physically ill... almost passed out. When she recovered, she tore the sheet into tiny, tiny pieces and told me to ignore it. At that moment, I knew the whole thing had to be true.'

  Decker waited.

  'I went down to Harrison... saw him...' Tears in her eyes, she turned suddenly irate. 'They had him working as a janitor, for Chrissakes! He was totally blitzed out on Thorazine! He drooled when he talked. His hands shook. He was a goddamn zombie! He was swallowed up by fear! This was my father! I owed him something for my genetics alone. I couldn't allow such a great man to continue to live under such demeaning conditions.'

  'Your mother had no problem with it.'

  She bolted up from her seat. 'My mother had three kids to raise and Dad had been scaring her with his crazy thoughts and theories.'

  'But you weren't aware of it?'

  'As a child, you have the tremendous capacity to deny reality. Sure, he had crazy ideas. But he was always a man with crazy ideas. And he got lots of scientific recognition for some of his crazy ideas! How was I, at twelve or thirteen or fourteen, supposed to know which of his ideas were brilliance and which were insanity?'

  A good point. Decker told her so.

  She sat back down, trying to calm herself, holding her coffee cup to mask shaking hands. 'Toward the end, Mom claimed that he got threatening! What else could she do!?' She pounded her desktop for emphasis, then threw her head back. 'She must have felt it saved our lives to get him away from us.'

  'Maybe it did.'

  'I don't know...' She looked up. 'Things certainly didn't work out well in my family. My brothers, though brilliant, never reached their full potential. Both of them dropped out. Emulating Dad, I guess. Because they really never knew him as Dad the scientist, just...Dad the nutcase. One's now a hermit in India. I haven't heard from Jason in five years. The other - Kyle - he spends most of his time whaling with the Eskimos in Alaska. He did say he'd come down for Dad's funeral if that ever gets under way.'

  Decker said, 'Why didn't your mom initially commit him closer to home?'

  'I don't know why!' she blurted out. 'Maybe fear of discovery. Or maybe she wanted him far away.' Eyes watering, she cried out, 'Who the hell are we to judge her actions!'

  'You're right, Europa. I'm sorry if I offended you.'

  'It's all right.' She closed her eyes. 'Nothing I haven't wondered myself.' A hesitation. Then she opened her eyes and said, 'I understand why she lied to us as youngsters. What I can't understand was why she continued the lies after we were grown. Finding out in some anonymous letter was dreadful! She should have told me!' Under her breath: 'She should have told me.'

  'So at twenty-one, you took on the burden of caring for your father. You hired a lawyer and became his conservator.'

  She said nothing. Then she said, 'Twenty-two actually. Took me a year to organize my thoughts.'

  'Noble of you,' Decker remarked.

  'Noble, but shortsighted. As soon as Dad was released, Pluto grabbed him. At first, I was relieved. I was a struggling college student with meager means of support, and here was this guy, who had known my father for years back in West Virginia, still willing to care for him... to attend to his needs. It wasn't until they formed the Order that Pluto's true intentions finally dawned on me. Dad, for all his craziness, was still a magnetic, powerful and completely mesmerizing leader. Pluto was completely the opposite. He could offer a shipload of drunken sailors a dozen whores, and they'd walk away from him. He was simply repulsive in the true sense of the word. There wasn't any way he could attract followers. But what he could do was manage my dad, who could attract followers.'

  She rolled her eyes.

  'Talk about teamwork - what's it called? Folie a deux? Two crazy people getting together, each one feeding the other's grandiose delusions and wreaking havoc?'

  Another big sigh.

  'It was a losing battle from the start. Pluto kept stoking Dad's crazy thoughts... completely manipulating him.'

  'But once the Order was established, it was your dad who was in charge.'

  'I think Venus helped in that regard - decreasing Pluto's hold over him. For that reason, I should have been grateful to her. Although, at the time, I was pretty damn angry at her.'

  'Pluto manipulating him, Venus manipulating him. But you were the one with the true power. Yet, you never considered recommitting your father.'

  'I know this sounds strange, but I couldn't stomach the thought of my father locked up again. Like he was nothing but some psychofreak... which he was.'

  'You acted out of kindness.'

  'It was a toss-up. Medicated and controlled, or crazy but free. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that he deserved to live his warped life in some kind of dignity.'

  'Even though your father's insanity had turned him - and you by extension - into laughing stocks among the scientific community.'

  'Yes, he made a quite an idiot out of himself. But that wasn't the worst part. He had these crazy theories about aliens and time travel. Some of it - the time travel part - was grounded in sound science. Most of it was highly implausible. If he had kept his time machines at the theoretical level, it wouldn't have been so bad. But he started trying to build one using money from his old bank accounts. Dad may have been delusional, but he knew his bank numbers.'

  'Funny how that works,' Decker said.

  'Tragic is more the word. He took out almost all of Mom's hard-earned, penny-pinching joint savings before we caught on. Mom blamed me for everything. She kept saying if I had left well enough alone, none of this would have happened. So here I was, at twenty-two, responsible for both my parents' problems.'

  'No wonder you let Pluto take over.'

  'I did, but it was a mistake. At least, Pluto didn't take the money and run, I'll say that much for
him.'

  'Maybe your father never gave it to him.'