When the Bough Breaks

by Jonathan Kellerman

  He turned away from me and stared at the wall. He had worked himself into a funk. I had seen it before. The most therapeutic thing to say was nothing. I ignored him and did some calisthenics.

  "Goddamn Jack La Lanne," he muttered.

  It took him ten minutes to come out of it, ten minutes of clenching and unclenching his big fists. Then came the tentative raising of the eyes, the inevitable sheepish grin.

  "How much for the therapy, Doctor?"

  I thought a minute.

  "Dinner. At a good place. No crap."

  He stood up and stretched, growled like a bear.

  "How about sushi? I'm goddamn barbaric tonight. I'll eat those fish alive."

  We drove to Oomasa, in Little Tokyo. The restaurant was crowded, mostly with Japanese. This was no trendy hot spot decked out in shoji screen elegance and waxed pine counters. The decor was red Naugahyde, stiff-backed chairs and plain white walls decorated only by a few Nikon calendars. The solitary concession to style was a large aquarium, in full view of the sushi bar, in which fancy goldfish struggled to propel themselves through bubbling, icy clear water. They gasped and bobbed, mutations ill-suited for survival in any but the most rarefied captivity, the products of hundreds of years of careful Oriental tinkering with nature-- lion heads with faces obscured by glossy, raspberry growths, bug-eyed black moors, celestials with eyes forced perpetually heavenward, ryukins so overloaded with finn age that they could barely move. We stared at them and drank Chivas. "That girl," Milo said, "the roommate. I felt she could help me. That she knew something about Elaine's lifestyle, maybe something about her and Handler. She was nailed tight, goddamn her."

  He finished his drink and motioned for another. It came and he gulped down half.

  A waitress skittered over on geisha feet and handed us hot towels. We wiped our hands and face. I felt my pores open, hungry for air.

  "You should be pretty good at talking to teachers, right? Probably did a lot of it back in the days when you were earning an honest living."

  "Sometimes teachers hate psychologists, Milo. They see us as dilettantes dropping theoretical pearls of wisdom on them while they do the dirty work."

  "Hmm." The rest of the Scotch disappeared.

  "But no matter. I'll talk to her for you. Where can I find her?"

  "Same school Gutierrez taught at. In West L.A., not far from you." He wrote the address on a napkin and gave it to me. "Her name's Raquel Ochoa." He spelled it, his voice thickening, slurring the words. "Use your badge." He slapped me on the back.

  There was a grating sound above our heads. We looked up to find the sushi chef smiling and sharpening his knives.

  We ordered. The fish was fresh, the rice just slightly sweet. The was abe horseradish cleared my sinuses. We ate in silence, against a backdrop of satnisen music and foreign chatter.

  13

  I awoke as stiff as if I'd been spray-starched; a full-fledged charley horse had taken hold of my muscles, a souvenir of my dance with Jaroslav. I fought it by taking a two-mile run down the canyon and back. Then I practiced karate moves out on the rear deck, to the amused comments of a pair of mockingbirds who interrupted their domestic quarrel long enough to look me over, then delivered what had to be the avian equivalent of a raspberry.

  "Fly down here, you little bastards," I grunted, "and I'll show you who's tough." They responded with hilarious screeching.

  The day was shaping up as a lung-buster, grimy fingers of pollution reaching over the mountains to strangle the sky. The ocean was obscured by a sulfurous sheath of airborne garbage. My chest ached in harmony with the stiffness in my joints, and by ten I was ready to quit.

  I planned to time my visit to the school where Raquel Ochoa taught for the noon break, hoping to find her free. That left enough time for a long, hot bath, a cold shower, and a carefully assembled breakfast of eggs with mushrooms, sourdough toast, grilled tomatoes and coffee.

  I dressed casually in dark brown slacks, tan corduroy sport coat, checked shirt and brown knit tie. Before I left I dialed a now-familiar number. Bonita Quinn answered.

  "Yes?"

  "Mrs. Quinn, Dr. Delaware. I just wanted to call to find out how Melody's been doing."

  "She's fine." Her tone would have frosted a beer mug. "Fine."

  Before I could say more she hung up.

  The school was in a middle-class part of town, but it could have been anywhere. It was the old familiar layout of citadels of learning throughout the city: flesh colored buildings arranged in classic penitentiary style, surrounded by a desert of black asphalt and secured by ten-foot-high chain link fencing. Someone had tried to brighten it up by painting a mural of children playing along the side of one of the buildings but it was scant redemption. What helped a bit more were the sight and sound of real children playing--running, jumping, tumbling, chasing each other, screaming like banshees, throwing balls, crying out with the fervor of the truly persecuted ("Teacher, he hit me!"), sitting in circles, reaching for the sky. A small group of bored-looking teachers watched from the sidelines.

  I climbed the front stairs and found the main office with little trouble. The internal floor plan of schools was as predictable as the drab exterior.

  I used to wonder why all the schools I knew were so hopelessly ugly, so predictably oppressive, then I dated a nurse whose father was one of the chief architects for the firm that had been building schools for the state for the past fifty years. She had unresolved feelings about him, and talked a lot about him: a drunken, melancholic man who hated his wife and despised his children more, who saw the world in terms of minimally varying shades of disappointment. A real Frank Lloyd Wright.

  The office reeked of mimeographing fluid. Its sole occupant was a stern, black woman in her forties, ensconced in a fortress of scarred golden oak. I showed her my badge, which didn't interest her, and asked for Raquel Ochoa. The name didn't seem to interest her either.

  "She's a teacher here. Fourth grade," I added.

  "It's lunchtime. Try the teachers' dining room."

  The dining room turned out to be an airless place, twenty feet by fifteen, into which folding tables and chairs had been crammed. A dozen men and women sat hunched over sack lunches and coffee, laughing, smoking, chewing. When I entered the room all activity ceased.

  "I'm looking for Ms. Ochoa."

  "You won't find her here, honey," said a stout woman with platinum hair.

  Several of the teachers laughed. They let me stand there for a while and then a fellow with a young face and old eyes said:

  "Room 304. Probably."

  "Thanks."

  I left. I was halfway down the hall before they started talking again.

  The door to 304 was half-open. I went in. Rows of unoccupied school desks filled every square inch of space, with the exception of a few feet at the front that had been cleared for the teacher's desk, a boxy metal rectangle behind which sat a woman busy at work. If she had heard me enter she gave no indication, as she continued to read, make checkmarks, cross out errors.

  An unopened brown bag sat at her elbow. Light streamed in through dusty windows in beams that were suffused with dancing, suspended particles. The Vermeer softness was at odds with the utilitarian severity of the room: stark white walls, a blackboard veneered with chalky residue, a soiled American flag.

  "Ms. Ochoa?"

  The face that looked up was out of a mural by Rivera. Reddish-brown skin stretched tightly over sharply defined but delicately constructed bones; liquid lips and melting black eyes gabled by full, dark brows. Her hair was long and sleek, parted in the middle, hanging down her back. Part Aztec, part Spanish, part unknown.

  "Yes?" Her voice was soft in volume but the timbre was defensively hard. Some of the hostility Milo had described was immediately apparent. I wondered if she was one of those people who had turned psychological vigilance into a fine art.

  I walked over to her, introduced myself and showed her the badge. She inspected it.

  "Ph.D. in what
?"

  "Psychology."

  She looked at me with disdain.

  "The police don't get satisfaction, so they send in the shrinks?"

  "It's not that simple."

  "Spare me the details." She returned her eyes to her paperwork.

  "I just want to talk to you for a few minutes. About your friend."

  "I told that big detective everything I know."

  "This is just a double-check."

  "How thorough." She picked up her red pencil and began slashing at the paper. I felt sorry for the students whose work was coming under scrutiny at this particular moment.

  "This isn't a psychological interview, if that's what you're worried about. It's--"

  "I'm not worried about anything. I told him everything,"

  "He doesn't think so."

  She slammed the pencil down. The point broke.

  "Are you calling me a liar, Mr. Ph.D?" Her speech was crisp and articulate but it still bore a Latin tinge.

  I shrugged.

  "Labels aren't important. What is, is finding out as much as possible about Elaine Gutierrez."

  "Elena," she snapped. "There's nothing to tell. Let the police do their job and stop sending their scientific snoopers around harassing people who are busy."

  "Too busy to help find the murderer of your best friend?"

  The head shot up. She brushed furiously at a loose strand of hair.

  "Please leave," she said between clenched jaws. "I have work to do."

  "Yes, I know. You don't even eat lunch with the rest of the teachers. You're very dedicated and serious --that's what it took to get out of the barrio--and that puts you above the laws of common courtesy."

  She stood up, all five feet of her. For a moment I thought she was going to slap me, as she drew her hand back. But she stopped herself, and stared.

  I could feel the acid heat coming my way but I held my gaze. Jaroslav would have been proud.

  "I'm busy," she finally said, but there was a pleading quality to the statement, as if she was trying to convince herself.

  "I don't want to take you on a cruise. I just want to ask a few questions about Elena."

  She sat down.

  "What kind of psychologist are you? You don't talk like one."

  I gave her a capsulized, deliberately vague history of my involvement in the case. She listened and I thought I saw her soften.

  "A child psychologist. We could use you around here."

  I looked around the classroom, counted forty-six desks in a space meant for twenty-eight.

  "I don't know what I could do--help you tie them down?"

  She laughed, then realized what she was doing and cut it off, like a bad connection.

  "It's no use talking about Elena," she said. "She only got--into trouble because of being involved with that..." She trailed off.

  "I know Handler was a creep. Detective Sturgis-the big guy--knows. And you're probably right. She was an innocent victim. But let's make sure, okay?"

  "You do this a lot? Work for the police?" She evaded me.

  "No. I'm retired."

  She looked at me with disbelief. "At your age?"

  "Post-burnout."

  That hit home. She dropped her mask a notch and a bit of humanity peeked through.

  "I wish I could afford it. Retirement."

  "I know what you mean. It must be crazy working with this kind of bureaucracy." I threw out the lure of empathy--administrators were the object of every teacher's ire. If she didn't go for it I wasn't sure what I'd do to gain rapport.

  She looked at me suspiciously, searching for a sign that I was patronizing her.

  "You don't work at all?" she asked.

  "I do some free-lance investing. It keeps me busy enough."

  We chatted for a while about the vagaries of the school system. She carefully avoided mention of anything personal, keeping it all in the realm of pop sociology--how rotten things were when parents weren't willing to get emotionally and intellectually involved with their children, how difficult it was to teach when half the kids came from broken homes and were so upset they could barely concentrate, the frustration of dealing with administrators who'd given up on life and stuck around only for their pensions, anger at the fact that a teacher's starting salary was less than that of a trash collector. She was twenty-nine and she'd lost any shred of idealism that had survived the transition from East L.A. to the world of Anglo bourgeoisie.

  She could really talk when she got going, the dark eyes flashing, the hands gesticulating--flying through the air like two brown sparrows.

  I sat like the teacher's pet and listened, giving her what everyone wants when they're unloading-empathy, an understanding gesture. Part of it was calculated--I wanted to break through to her in order to find out more about Elena Gutierrez--but some of it was my old therapeutic persona, thoroughly genuine.

  I was starting to think I'd gotten through when the bell rang. She became a teacher again, the arbiter of right and wrong.

  "You must go now. The children will be coming back."

  I stood up and leaned on her desk.

  "Can we talk later? About Elena?"

  She hesitated, biting her lip. The sound of a stampede began as a faint rumble and grew thunderous. High-pitched voices wailed their way closer.

  "All right. I'm off at two-thirty."

  An offer to buy her a drink would have been a mistake. Keep it businesslike, Alex.

  "Thank you. I'll meet you at the gate."

  "No. Meet me in the teachers' parking lot. At the south side of the building." Away from prying eyes.

  Her car was a dusty white Vega. She walked toward it carrying a stack of books and papers that reached up to her chin.

  "Can I help you?"

  She gave me the load, which must have weighed at least twenty pounds, and took a minute to find her keys. I noticed that she'd put on makeup--eye shadow that accentuated the depth of her orbs. She looked around eighteen.

  "I haven't eaten yet," she said. It was less an angling for an invitation than a complaint.

  "No brown bag?"

  "I threw it out. I make a lousy lunch. On a day like today it's too lousy to take. There's a chop house on Wilshire."

  "Can I drive you?"

  She looked at the Vega.

  "Sure, why not? I'm low on gas, anyway. Toss those on the front seat." I put the books down and she locked the car. "But I'll pay for my own lunch."

  We left the school grounds. I led her to the Seville. When she saw it her eyebrows rose.

  "You must be a good investor."

  "I get lucky from time to time."

  She sank back in the soft leather and let out a breath. I got behind the wheel and started up the engine.

  "I've changed my mind," she said. "You pay for the lunch."

  She ate meticulously, cutting her steak into tiny pieces, spearing each morsel individually and slipping it into her mouth, and wiping her mouth with her napkin every third bite. I was willing to bet she was a tough grader.

  "She was my best friend," she said, putting down her fork and picking up her water glass. "We grew up together in East L.A. Rafael and Andy--her brothers-played with Miguel." At the mention of her dead brother her eyes misted then grew hard as obsidian. She pushed her plate away. She'd eaten a quarter of her food. "When we moved to Echo Park the Gutierrezes moved with us. The boys were always getting into trouble--minor mischief, pranks. Elena and I were good girls. Goody-goodies, actually. The nuns loved us." She smiled.

  "We were as close as sisters. And like sisters there was a lot of competition between us. She was always better-looking."

  She read the doubt in my face.

  "Really. I was a scrawny kid. I developed late. Elena was--voluptuous, soft. The boys followed her around with their tongues hanging out. Even when she was eleven and twelve. Here." She reached into her purse and took out a snapshot. More photographic memories.