When the Bough Breaks

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Patients began asking me if I was all right. At that point I must have been noticeably troubled because it takes a lot to shift a patient's focus away from himself.

  I had enough education to know what was going on but not enough insight to make sense of it.

  It wasn't finding the body, for I was used to shocking events, but the discovery of Hickle's corpse was a catalyst that plunged me into a full-fledged crisis. Looking back now I can see that treating his victims had allowed me to step off the treadmill for six weeks, and that the end of treatment had left me with time to engage in the dangerous pastime of self evaluation. I didn't like what I learned.

  I was alone, isolated, without a single real friend in the world. For almost a decade the only humans I'd related to had been patients, and patients by definition were takers, not givers.

  The feelings of loneliness grew painful. I turned further inward and became profoundly depressed. I called in sick to the hospital, canceled my private patients and spent days in bed watching soap operas.

  The sound and lights of the TV washed over me like some vile paralytic drug, deadening but not healing.

  I ate little and slept too much, felt heavy, weak and useless. I kept the phone off the hook and never left the house except to shove the junk mail inside the door and retreat to solitude.

  On the eighth day of this funereal existence Milo appeared at the door wanting to ask me questions. He held a notepad in his hands, just like an analyst. Only he didn't look like an analyst: a big, droopy, shaggy haired fellow in slept-in clothes.

  "Dr. Alex Delaware?" He held up his badge.

  "Yes."

  He introduced himself and stared at me. I was dressed in a ratty yellow bathrobe. My untrimmed beard had reached rabbinic proportions and my hair looked like electrified Brillo. Despite thirteen hours of sleep I looked and felt drowsy.

  "I hope I'm not disturbing you, Doctor. Your office referred me to your home number, which was out of order."

  I let him in and he sat down, scanning the place. Foot-high stacks of unopened mail littered the dining room table. The house was dark, drapes drawn, and smelled stale. "Days of Our Lives" flickered on the tube.

  He rested his notepad on one knee and told me the interview was a formality for the coroner's inquest. Then he had me rehash the night I'd found the body, interrupting to clarify a point, scratching and jotting and staring. It was tediously procedural and my mind wandered often, so that he had to repeat his questions. Sometimes I talked so softly he asked me to repeat my answers.

  After twenty minutes he asked:

  "Doctor, are you all right?"

  "I'm fine." Unconvincingly.

  "Oka-ay." He shook his head, asked a few more questions, then put his pencil down and laughed nervously.

  "You know I feel kind of funny asking a doctor how he feels."

  "Don't worry about it."

  He resumed questioning me and, even through the haze, I could see he had a curious technique. He'd skip from topic to topic with no apparent line of inquiry. It threw me off balance and made me more alert.

  "You're an assistant professor at the medical school?"

  "Associate."

  "Pretty young to be an associate professor, aren't you."

  "I'm thirty-two. I started young."

  "Uh-huh. How many kids in the treatment program?"

  "About thirty."

  "Parents?"

  "Maybe ten, eleven couples, half a dozen single parents."

  "Any talk about Mr. Hickle in treatment?"

  "That's confidential."

  "Of course, sir.

  "You ran the treatment as part of your job at--" he consulted his notes--"Western Pediatric Hospital."

  "It was volunteer work associated with the hospital."

  "You didn't get paid for it?"

  "I continued to receive my salary and the hospital relieved me of other duties."

  "There were fathers in the treatment groups, too."

  "Yes." I thought I'd mentioned couples.

  "Some of those guys were pretty mad at Mr. Hickle, I guess."

  Mr. Hickle. Only a policeman could be so artificially polite as to call a dead pervert sir. Between themselves they used other terms, I supposed. Insufferable etiquette was a way of keeping the barrier between cop and civilian.

  "That's confidential, Detective."

  He grinned as if to say Can't blame a fella for trying, and scribbled in his notepad.

  "Why so many questions about a suicide?"

  "Just routine." He answered automatically without looking up. "I like to be thorough."

  He stared at me absently, then asked:

  "Did you have any help running the groups?"

  "I encouraged the families to participate--to help themselves. I was the only professional."

  "Peer counseling?"

  "Exactly."

  "We've got it in the department now." Noncommittal. "So they kind of took over."

  "Gradually. I was always there."

  "Did any of them have a key to your office?"

  Aha.

  "Absolutely not. You're thinking one of those people killed Hickle and faked it to look like suicide?" Of course he was. The same suspicion had occurred to me.

  "I'm not drawing conclusions. Just investigating." This guy was elusive enough to be an analyst.

  "I see."

  Abruptly he stood, closed his pad and put his pencil away.

  I rose to walk him to the door, teetered and blacked out.

  The first thing I saw when things came back into focus was his big ugly face looming over me. I felt damp and cold. He was holding a washcloth that dripped water on to my face.

  "You fainted. How do you feel?"

  "Fine." The last thing I felt was fine.

  "You don't look wonderful. Maybe I should call a doctor, Doctor."

  "No."

  "You sure?"

  "No. It's nothing. I've had the flu for a few days. I just need to get something in my stomach."

  He went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of orange juice. I sipped slowly and started to feel stronger.

  I sat up and held the glass myself.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "To protect and serve."

  "I'm really fine now. If you don't have any more questions..."

  "No. Nothing more at this time." He got up and opened some windows; the light hurt my eyes. He turned off the TV.

  "Want something to eat before I go?"

  What a strange, motherly man.

  "I'll be fine."

  "Okay, Doctor. You take care now."

  I was eager to see him go. But when the sound of his car engine was no longer audible I felt disoriented. Not depressed, like before, but agitated, restless, without peace. I tried watching "As the World Turns" but couldn't concentrate. Now the inane dialogue annoyed me. I picked up a book but the words wouldn't come into focus. I took a swallow of orange juice and it left a bad taste in my mouth and a stabbing pain in my throat.

  I went out on the patio and looked up at the sky until luminescent discs danced in front of my eyes. My skin itched. Bird songs irritated me. I couldn't sit still.

  It went on that way the entire afternoon. Miserable.

  At four-thirty he called.

  "Dr. Delaware? This is Milo Sturgis. Detective Sturgis."

  "What can I do for you, Detective?"

  "How are you feeling?"

  "Much better, thank you."

  "That's good."

  There was a silence.

  "Uh, Doctor, I'm kind of on shaky ground here..."

  "What's on your mind?"

  "You know, I was in the Medical Corps in Viet Nam. We used to see a lot of something called acute stress reaction. I was wondering if..."

  "You think that's what I've got?"

  "Well..."

  "What was the prescribed treatment in Viet Nam?"

  "We got them back into action as quickly as possible. The more they avoid
ed combat the worse they got."

  "Do you think that's what I should do? Jump back into the swing of things?"

  "I can't say, Doctor. I'm no psychologist."

  "You'll diagnose but you won't treat."

  "Okay, Doctor. Just wanted to see if--"

  "No. Wait. I'm sorry. I appreciate your calling." I was confused, wondering what ulterior motive he could possibly have.

  "Yeah, sure. No problem."

  "Thanks, really. You'd make a hell of a shrink, Detective."

  He laughed.

  "That's sometimes part of the job, sir."

  After he hung up I felt better than I'd felt in days. The next morning I called him at the West L.A. Division headquarters and offered to buy him a drink.

  We met at Angela's, across from the West L.A. station on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a coffee shop with a smoky cocktail lounge in the back populated by several groupings of large, solemn men. I noticed that few of them acknowledged Milo, which seemed unusual. I had always thought cops did a lot of backslapping and good-natured cussing after hours. These men took their drinking seriously. And quietly.

  He had great potential as a therapist. He sipped Chivas, sat back, and let me talk. No more interrogation now. He listened and I spilled my guts.

  By the end of the evening, though, he was talking too.

  Over the next couple of weeks Milo and I found out that we had a lot in common. We were about the same age--he was ten months older--and had been born into working-class families in medium-sized towns. His father had been a steelworker, mine an electrical assembler. He too had been a good student, graduating with honors from Purdue and with an MA. in literature from Indiana U." Bloomington. He'd planned to be a teacher when he was drafted. Two years in Viet Nam had somehow turned him into a policeman.

  Not that he considered his job at odds with his intellectual pursuits. Homicide detectives, he informed me, were the intellectuals of any police department. Investigating murder requires little physical activity and lots of brain work Veteran homicide men sometimes violate regulations and don't carry a weapon. Just lots of pens and pencils. Milo packed his.38 but confessed that he really didn't need it.

  "It's very white collar, Alex, with lots of paperwork, decision-making, attention to detail."

  He liked being a cop, enjoyed catching bad guys. Sometimes he thought he might like to try something else, but exactly what that something else was, wasn't clear.

  We had other interests in common. We'd both done some martial arts training. Milo had taken a mixed bag of self-defense courses while in the army. I'd learned fencing and karate while in graduate school. We were miserably out of shape but deluded ourselves that it would all come back if we needed it. Both of us appreciated good food, good music and the virtues of solitude.

  The rapport between us developed quickly.

  About three weeks after we'd known each other he told me he was homosexual. I was taken by surprise and had nothing to say.

  "I'm telling you now because I don't want you to think I've been trying to put the make on you."

  Suddenly I was ashamed, because that had been my initial thought, exactly.

  It was hard to accept, at first, his being gay, despite all my supposed psychological sophistication. I know all the facts. That they make up 5 to 10 percent of virtually any human grouping. That most of them look just like me and you. That they could be anybody--the butcher, the baker, the local homicide dick. That most of them are reasonably well-adjusted.

  And yet the stereotypes adhere to the brain. You expect them to be mincing, screaming, nelly fairies; leather-armored shaven-skull demons; oh-so-preppy mustachioed young things in Izod shirts and khaki trousers; or hiking-booted bulldykes.

  Milo didn't look homosexual.

  But he was and had been comfortable with it for several years. He wasn't in the closet, neither did he flaunt it.

  I asked him if the department knew about it.

  "Uh-huh. Not in the sense of filing an official report. It's just something that's known."

  "How do they treat you?"

  "Disapproval from a distance--cold looks. But basically it's live and let live. They're short-staffed and I'm good. What do they want? To drag in the ACLU and lose a good detective in the bargain? Ed Davis was a homophobe. He's gone and it's not so bad."

  "What about the other detectives?"

  He shrugged. "They leave me alone. We talk business. We don't double-date."

  Now the lack of recognition by the men at Angela's made sense.

  Some of Milo's initial altruism, his reaching out to help me, was a little more understandable, too. He knew what it was like to be alone. A gay cop was a person in limbo. You could never be one of the gang back at the station, no matter how well you did your job. And the homosexual community was bound to be suspicious of someone who looked, acted like and was a cop.

  "I figured I should tell you, since we seem to be getting friendly."

  "It's no big deal, Milo."

  "No?"

  "No." I wasn't really all that comfortable with it. But I was damn well going to work on it.

  A month after Stuart Hickle stuck a.22 in his mouth and blasted his brains all over my wallpaper, I made some major changes in my life.

  I resigned my job at Western Pediatric and closed down my practice. I referred all my patients to a former student, a first-rate therapist who was starting out in practice and needed the business. I had taken very few new referrals since starting the groups for the

  Kim's Korner families, so there was less separation anxiety than would normally be expected.

  I sold an apartment building in Malibu, forty units that I'd purchased seven years before, for a large profit. I also let go of a duplex in Santa Monica. Part of the money--the portion that would eventually go to taxes--I put in a high-yield money market. The rest went into tax-free municipals. It wasn't the kind of investing that would make me richer, but it would provide financial stability. I figured I could live off the interest for two or three years as long as I didn't get too extravagant.

  I sold my old Chevy Two and bought a Seville, a seventy-nine, the last year they looked good. It was forest-green with a saddle-colored leather interior that was cushy and quiet. With the amount of driving I'd be doing, the lousy mileage wouldn't make much difference. I threw away most of my old clothes and got new stuff--mostly soft fabrics--knits, cords, rubber soled shoes, cashmere sweaters, robes, shorts, and pullovers.

  I had the pipes cleaned out on the hot tub that I'd never used since I bought the house. I started to buy food and drink milk. I pulled my old Martin out of its case and strummed it on the balcony. I listened to records. I read for pleasure for the first time since high school. I got a tan. I shaved off my beard and discovered I had a face, and not a bad one at that.

  I dated good women. I met Robin and things really started to get better.

  Be-kind-to-Alex time. Early retirement six months before my thirty-third birthday.

  It was fun while it lasted.

  3

  Morton Handler's last residence--if you didn't count the morgue--had been a luxury apartment complex off Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. It had been built into a hillside and designed to give a honeycomb effect: a loosely connected chain of individual units linked by corridors that had been placed at seemingly random locations, the apartments staggered to give each one a full view of the ocean. The motif was bastard Spanish: blindingly white textured stucco walls, red tile roofs, window accents of black wrought iron. Plantings of azalea and hibiscus filled in occasional patches of earth. There were lots of potted plants sunk in large terra-cotta containers: coconut palms, rubber plants, sun ferns, temporary-looking, as if someone planned on moving them all out in the middle of the night.

  Handler's unit was on an intermediate level. The front door was sealed, with an LAPD. sticker taped across it. Lots of footprints dirtied the terrazzo walkway near the entrance.

  Milo led me across a terrace f
illed with polished stones and succulents to a unit eater-cornered from the murder scene. Adhesive letters spelling out the word MANGER were affixed to the door. Bad jokes about Baby Jesus flashed through my mind.