Jonathan Kellerman - [Alex Delaware 01]

by When the Bough Breaks (Shrunken Heads) (v5. 0) (epub)

  The car came to a halt.

  “It’s clear now,” he said.

  I crawled from under the blanket, got out of the car and motioned him to follow. We walked up the path, side by side. Counselors passed us in pairs, greeted him with deference and moved on. I tried to look like his associate.

  La Casa was peaceful at night. Camp songs filtered through the trees. “A Hundred Bottles of Beer.” “Oh Susanna.” Children’s voices. An off-key guitar. Microphoned adult commands. Mosquitoes and moths vied for space around mushroom lights imbedded in the foliage at our feet. The sweet smell of jasmine and oleander in the air. An occasional whiff of brine from the ocean, so close but unseen. To the right the open gray-green expanse of the Meadow. A pleasant enough graveyard … The Grove, dark as fudge, a piney refuge …

  We passed the pool, taking care not to slip on the wet cement. Towle moved like an old warrior heading into his last battle, chin up, arms at his side, marching. I kept the .38 within easy reach.

  We made it to the bunkers unnoticed.

  “That one,” I said. “With the blue door.”

  Down the ramp. A hard twist of the key and we were in.

  The building was divided into two rooms. The one in the front was empty except for a single folding chair pushed under an aluminum bridge table. The walls were of unpainted block and smelled of mildew. The floors were cold slab concrete, as was the ceiling. A square black wound of skylight marked the ceiling’s center. The only light came from a single, unadorned bulb.

  She was in the back, on an army cot, covered with a coarse olive drab blanket and restrained with leather straps across her ankles and chest. Her arms were pinioned under the blanket. She breathed slowly, mouth open, sleeping, head to one side, her pale, tear-streaked skin translucent in the semidarkness. Wisps of hair hung loosely around her face. Tiny, vulnerable, lost.

  At the foot of the cot was a plastic tray holding an uneaten, congealed fried egg, limp french fries, shriveled brown-tipped lettuce and an open wax container of milk.

  “Untie her.” I pointed the gun.

  Towle bent over her, working in the dimness to unfasten the straps.

  “What do you have her on?”

  “Valium, high dose. Thorazine on top of that.”

  Dr. Towle’s magic elixir.

  He got the restraints loose and peeled back the blanket. She was wearing dirty jeans and a red-and-white striped T-shirt with Snoopy on the front. He lifted the shirt and palpated her abdomen, took her pulse, felt her forehead: played doctor.

  “She looks thin, but otherwise healthy,” he pronounced.

  “Wrap her back up. Can you carry her?”

  “Certainly,” he replied, miffed that I could doubt his strength.

  “All right then, let’s go.”

  He gathered her up in his arms, looking for all the world like the Great White Father. The child let out a sigh, a shudder, and clung to him.

  “Keep her totally covered once we get outside.”

  I began a half-turn. A soft, musical voice at my back drawled:

  “Don’t move, Doctor Delaware, or you’ll lose your fucking head.”

  I stood still.

  “Put the young one down, Will. Take his gun.”

  Towle looked at me blankly. I shrugged. He placed Melody on the cot gently and covered her. I handed him the .38.

  “Against the wall with your hands up, Doctor. Search him, Will.”

  Towle patted me down.

  “Turn around.”

  McCaffrey stood there grinning, filling the opening between the two rooms, a .357 magnum in one hand, a Polaroid camera in the other. He wore an iridescent lime-green jumpsuit decorated with a score of snap-pockets and buckles, and matching lime patent leather shoes. In the dim light his complexion reflected greenly as well.

  “Task, tsk, Willie. What mischief are we up to tonight?”

  The great physician hung his head and shuffled nervously.

  “Not feeling loquacious tonight, Willie? That’s all right. We’ll talk later.” The colorless eyes narrowed. “Right now there’s business to attend to.”

  “Is this your idea of altruism?” I looked at Melody’s limp form.

  “Shut up!” he snapped. To Towle: “Remove the child’s clothing.”

  “Gus—I—why?”

  “Just do as I say, Willie.”

  “No more, Gus,” Towle pleaded. “We’ve done enough.”

  “No, you idiot. We haven’t done enough at all. This smartass here has the potential to cause us—you and me—lots of trouble. I made plans to eliminate him, but apparently I’ll have to do the job myself.”

  “Plans,” I sneered. “Halstead’s rotting in a vacant lot with a spike in his throat. He was a bumbler, like all of your slaves.”

  McCaffrey pursed his thick lips.

  “I’m warning you,” he said.

  “That’s your specialty, isn’t it?” I continued, playing for time. I saw his massive silhouette shift as he tried to keep me in his sights. But the darkness made it difficult as did Towle’s body, which had gotten between us as he fidgeted under his master’s glare. “You have a knack for finding bumblers and losers, emotional cripples, misfits. The same knack flies have for locating shit. You zero in on their open wounds, sink your fangs into them, suck them dry.”

  “How literary,” he replied in a lilting voice, obviously fighting to maintain control. We were in close quarters and impulsiveness could prove hazardous.

  “Her clothes, Will,” he said. “Take them all off.”

  “Gus—”

  “Do it, you sniveling piece of turd!”

  Towle raised his arm in front of his face like a child warding off a blow. When none was forthcoming he moved toward the child.

  “You’re a doctor,” I said. “A respected physician. Don’t listen to him—”

  Fast, faster than I thought possible, McCaffrey stepped forward in the clearing Towle had created. He slashed with one elephantine sleeve and raked the side of my head with his gun. I fell to the floor, my face exploding with pain, hands protecting myself from further assault, blood running between my fingers.

  “Now you stay there, sir, and keep your fucking mouth shut.”

  Towle removed Melody’s T-shirt. Her chest was concave and white, the ribs twin grilles of gray-blue shadow.

  “Now the pants. The panties. Everything.”

  “Why are we doing this, Gus?” Towle wanted to know. To my ears, which were far from perfect, one being ripped and bloody, the other filled with watery echoes, his speech sounded slurred. I wondered if stress could break through the biochemical barrier he’d erected around his damaged mind.

  “Why?” McCaffrey laughed. “You’re not used to seeing this type of thing firsthand, are you, Willie? You’ve had a sanitized role up until now, enjoying the luxury of distance. Well, no matter, I’ll explain it to you.”

  He raised an eyebrow at Towle contemptuously, looked down at me and laughed again. The sound reverberated painfully in my injured skull. The blood continued to run down my face. My head felt mushy, loose on its stalk. I began to grow nauseated and dizzy, and the floor rose up at me. Terror gripped me as I wondered if he’d hit me hard enough to cause brain damage. I knew what a subdural hematoma could do to the fragile gray jelly that made life worth living … Crazily, fighting for strength and clarity, I pictured my brain in an anatomist’s tray, pinioned and splayed, and tried to localize the site of the injury. The gun had smashed against my left side—the dominant hemisphere, for I am right-handed … that was bad. The dominant side controlled logical processes: reasoning, analysis, deduction—the stuff to which I’d grown addicted over thirty-three years. I thought about losing all of that, of fading into dimness and confusion, then remembered two-year-old Willie Junior, struck down in much the same way. He’d lost it all … which might have been merciful. For had he survived, the damage would have been great. Left side/right side … the tides …

  “We’re going to put
on a little stage play, Willie,” McCaffrey lectured. “I’ll be the producer and director. You’ll be my assistant, helping me with the props.” He swung the camera in an arc. “The stars of the show will be little Melody and our friend Doctor Alex Delaware. The name of the play will be—‘Death of a Shrink,’ subtitled ‘Caught in the Act.’ A morality play.”

  “Gus—”

  “The plot is as follows: Doctor Delaware, our erstwhile villain, is well-known as a caring, sensitive child psychologist. However, unbeknownst to his colleagues and his patients, his choice of profession did not arise out of any great sense of—altruism. No, Doctor Delaware has chosen to become a kiddy shrink to be closer to the kiddies. To be able to fondle and abuse their genitals. In short, a deviate, an opportunist, the lowest of the low. An evil and gravely sick man.” He paused to look down on me, chuckling, breathing hard. Despite the chill, he was sweating, his glasses sliding low on his nose. The top of his kinky head was a halo of moisture. I looked at the .38 in Towle’s hand, and measured the distance between it and the spot where I lay. McCaffrey saw me, shook his head, and mouthed the word no, showing me his teeth.

  “With these same depraved motivations in mind, Doctor Delaware applies for membership in the Gentleman’s Brigade. He visits La Casa. We show him around. We screen him and our tests reveal him to be unsuitable for inclusion into our honorable fraternity. We reject him. Furious and frustrated at being denied a lifetime supply of hairless pussy and tiny little pricks, he simmers.”

  He stopped the narration and made loud slurping noises. Melody stirred in her sleep.

  “He simmers,” he repeated. “Stews in his own juices. Finally, at the height of his sick rage, he breaks into La Casa one night and roams the grounds until he finds a victim. A poor orphan girl, defenseless, alone in her dormitory because she is sick in bed with the flu. The madman loses control. Rapes her, virtually tears her apart—the autopsy will show uncommon savagery, Will. Takes pictures of the ghastly deed. A hideous crime. As the child cries out, screaming for her life, we—you and me, Will—happen to be passing by. We rush to her aid, but it is too late. The child has succumbed.

  “We take in the carnage before us with horror and disgust. Delaware, discovered, rises up against us, gun in hand. Heroically we wrestle him to the ground, struggle for the weapon and in the process the murderer is fatally wounded. The good guys win, and there is peace in the valley.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  He ignored me.

  “Not bad, eh, Will?”

  “Gus, it won’t work.” Towle stepped between us again. “He knows everything—the teacher and the Nemeth boy—”

  “Quiet. It will work. The past is the best predictor of the future. We have succeeded before, we will continue to triumph.”

  “Gus—”

  “Silence! I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Strip her!”

  I propped myself on my elbows and spoke through aching, swollen jaws, struggling to make sense out of what I was saying even as I told it.

  “How about another script? This one’s called The Big Lie. It’s about a man who thinks he’s murdered his wife and child and sells out his entire life to a blackmailer.”

  “Shut up.” McCaffrey advanced on me. Towle blocked his way, aiming the .38 at the half-acre of green-clad fat. It was a Mexican standoff.

  “I want to hear what he has to say, Gus. Things are confusing me. Things hurt. I want him to explain …”

  “Think,” I said, talking as fast as the pain allowed. “Did you ever check Willie Junior’s body for signs of life? No. He did. He told you your boy was dead. That you’d killed him. But was the body ever found? Did you ever actually see the body?”

  Towle’s face tightened with concentration. He was slipping, losing his grip on reality, digging his nails in, fighting to hold on.

  “I—I don’t know. Willie was dead. They told me. The tides …”

  “Maybe. But think: It was a golden opportunity. Lilah’s death wouldn’t have brought a charge greater than involuntary manslaughter. Domestic violence wasn’t even taken seriously in those days. With the lawyers your family would have hired, you might have gotten off with probation. But two deaths—especially with one a child—would have been impossible to brush off. He needed you to believe Junior was dead to be able to hook you.”

  “Will,” said McCaffrey, threateningly.

  “I don’t know—such a long time …”

  “Think! Did you hit him hard enough to kill him? Maybe not. Use your brain. It’s a good one. You remembered before.”

  “I used to have a good-brain,” he muttered.

  “You still do! Remember. You hit little Willie on the side of the head. What side?”

  “Don’t know—”

  “Will, it’s all lies. He’s trying to poison your mind.” McCaffrey looked for a way to silence me. But Towle’s gun rose and nudged the spot where a normal person would have had a heart.

  “What side, Doctor?” I demanded.

  “I’m right-handed,” he answered, as if discovering the fact for the first time. “I use my right hand. I hit him with my right hand … I see it … He’s coming at me from his bedroom. Crying for Mommy. Coming from the right, throwing himself at me. I—hit him—on his right side. The right side.”

  The pain in my head turned the act of talking into torture, but I bore down.

  “Yes. Exactly. Think! What if McCaffrey hoaxed you—you didn’t kill Willie. You injured him, but he survived. What kind of damage, what kind of symptoms, could be caused by trauma to the right hemisphere in a developing child?”

  “Right hemisphere cerebral damage—the right brain controls the left side,” he recited. “Right brain damage causes left-side dysfunction.”

  “Perfect,” I urged him on. “A severe blow to the right brain could bring about left-side hemiparesis. A bad left side”.

  “Earl …”

  “Yes. The body was never found because the child never died. McCaffrey felt his pulse, found one, saw you in shock over what you’d done and exploited your guilt. He wrapped up both bodies, with a little help from your buddies. Lilah was put behind the wheel of the car and dumped off the Evergreen Bridge. McCaffrey took the child. Probably got him some kind of medical help, but not the best, because a reputable doctor would have had to report the incident to the police. After the funeral he disappeared. Those were your words. He disappeared because he had to. He had the child with him. He took him to Mexico, who knows where, renamed him, changed him from your son into the kind of person someone raised by a monster would turn out to be. He made him his robot.”

  “Earl …Willie Junior.” Towle’s brows knitted.

  “Ridiculous! Out of the way, Will! I order it!”

  “It’s the truth,” I said through the pounding in my head. “Tonight, before you took your pills, you said Melody looked vaguely familiar. Turn carefully—don’t let him out of your sight—and take a look at her. Tell me why.”

  Towle backed away, kept the gun on McCaffrey, took a short look at Melody, and then a longer one.

  “She looks,” he said, softly, “like Lilah.”

  “Her grandmother.”

  “I couldn’t know—”

  Of course he couldn’t. The Quinns were poor, illiterate, the dregs of society. Piss-poor protoplasm. His views on the genetic superiority of the upper class would have prevented him from even fantasizing a connection between them and his bloodline. Now his defenses were down and the insights were hitting his consciousness like drops of acid—each point of contact raising psychic wounds. His son a murderer, a man conditioned to be a night-hunting beast. Dead. His daughter-in-law, intellectually limited, a helpless, pathetic creature. Dead. His granddaughter, the child on whom he’d plied his trade and medicated into stupor. Alive. But not for long.

  “He wants to murder her. To tear her apart. You heard him. The autopsy will show uncommon savagery.”

  Towle turned on the man in green.

  “Gus
—” he sobbed.

  “Now, now, Will,” said McCaffrey soothingly. Then he blew Towle away with the .357. The bullet entered his abdomen and exited through his back in a fine spray of blood, skin and cashmere. He slammed backward, landing at the side of the cot. The report of the big gun echoed through the concrete room. A thunderstorm. The child awoke and began screaming.

  McCaffrey pointed the gun at her, reflexively. I threw myself at him and kicked his wrist, knocking the gun loose. It sailed backward, into the front room. He howled, rabid. I kicked him again, in the shin. His leg felt like a side of beef. He backed into the front room, wanting the gun. I went after him. He lunged, his bulk rolling. I used both hands to hit him in the lower back. My fists sank into his softness. He barely budged. His hand was inches from the magnum. I kicked it away, then used my foot to smash his ribs with little effect. He was too damned big and too damned tall to be able to get a facial punch in. I went for his legs and thighs, and tripped him.

  He came crashing down, a felled redwood, taking me with him. Snarling, cursing, drooling, he rolled on top of me and got his hands around my throat. He panted his sour breath on me, the lumpy face crimson, the fish eyes swallowed by fleshy folds, squeezing. I fought to get out from under him but couldn’t move. I experienced the panic of the sudden paralytic. He squeezed tighter. I pushed up helplessly.

  His face darkened. With effort, I thought. Crimson to maroon to red-black, then a splash of color. The kinky hair exploding. The blood bright and fresh, pouring out of his nose, his ears, his mouth. The eyes opening wide, blinking furiously. A look of great insult on the grotesque face. Gargling noises from the jowl-wrapped gullet. Needles and triangles of broken glass raining down upon us. His inert carcass a shield from the rain.

  The skylight was an open wound now. A face peered down. Black, serious. Delano Hardy. Something else black: the nose of a rifle.

  “Hold on, Consultant,” he said. “We’re coming to get you.”

  “Your face looks uglier than mine,” Milo said when he’d pulled McCaffrey off of me.

  “Yeah,” I said, struggling to articulate through a mouth that felt as if I’d sucked on razor blades, “but mine will look better in a couple of days.”