Breakdown

Chapter 10

Back at the station, we agreed there was little left to do.

Milo would check with Central Division to see if anyone remembered Zelda and Ovid and I’d go “the glam route,” trying to reach someone associated with SubUrban.

After that, it would be time to back away.

He was telling the truth. I, not so much.

Moments after he dropped me off I was compiling a list of California boarding schools that accepted pre-adolescents. Workable list: thirty-nine institutions, with student bodies ranging from the intellectually gifted to kids with special needs — mostly defined as learning disabilities and/or weight problems. The latter I eliminated, which cut the roster by fifteen.

Nearly every school was situated where land was plentiful and scenic. When tuition rates were posted, they were at Ivy League levels. Maybe Zelda had managed to create an educational fund before her breakdown, even hired a trustee to guard Ovid’s welfare.

Or...

I got to work, spinning the same story to receptionist after receptionist: I was Ovid Chase’s uncle, his mother had just been hospitalized for an acute ailment (“Ovid knows the details”) and needed to talk to her son. Reactions were invariably sympathetic but when records were checked and Ovid’s name didn’t show up, confusion gave way to suspicion and I hung up, thankful my home number was blocked.

Two-plus hours of utter failure. I called Kevin Bracht and asked how Zelda was doing.

“No change, Doc, would’ve called you if there was. I could go in and try to talk to her but I figure let sleeping patients lie.”

“Agreed. I’ll be by tomorrow to take her to a placement I found. Anything else I should know, Kevin?”

“Just that it’s extremely weird being here at night. The Hyphen and her secretary leave at four and the building’s locked up tight. I have a key but I’m starting to feel I’m the 5150. So please, Doc. Rescue me.”

“Will do,” I said. “Try to have a good dinner.”

“You bet,” said Bracht. “Found a few fancy places on the take-out list. I’m looking forward to steak and lobster, courtesy of the federal government.”

“Bon appétit.”

“Might as well be bon something.”

Partial episodes of SubUrban were all over the Internet. I was about to view one when Robin came into my office and ruffled my hair.

“Can I distract you long enough for dinner?”

I glanced at my desk clock. Just after eight p.m. “Where we going?”

“Thirty feet away. I barbecued some chicken.”

“Oh. Great, thanks — I’d have been happy to help.”

She smiled. “I looked in on you an hour ago and saw a man possessed.”

I hadn’t seen or heard her. “More like dispossessed.”

“Of what?”

“Progress.”

That sounded like Milo but Robin was kind enough not to point it out. I got up and drew her to me and kissed her. When we broke, she was breathless and laughing. “Nice to be appreciated, but maybe you should wait to taste the chicken.”

The meal was great, my token contribution clearing and loading the dishwasher, then mixing us a couple of Sidecars. “Let’s drink out by the pond, handsome. It’s a nice night.”

Still trying to settle me down.

She’d probably suggest a bath before bedtime. The only person who ever cared much about me. I kept her drink light, tossed extra brandy into mine.

We settled by the water’s edge, sipped and watched the fish create gentle eddies.

I reached for Robin’s hand, said the right things, made the right facial expressions.

When we returned to the house, she said, “I haven’t bathed yet.”

The next morning at eight I caught Milo at home and asked him to get the details of Zelda’s Bel Air arrest.

“Why?”

“Sherry Andover’s questions about violence stuck with me. I’d like to be on solid ground.”

An hour later, he got back to me. “The female resident heard noise in the backyard and went out and found Zelda crouched in a corner. Zelda stood up and began waving her hands and screaming ‘horribly.’ That woke the male up and he overpowered Zelda, who tried to fight him off while his girlfriend dialed 911. Does that change anything?”

“It could be worse,” I said, “but compared with her previous arrests, it’s a step in the wrong direction.”

“Speaking of previous, no one at Central remembers her and there’s no record of her ever having a kid with her. But I was half wrong about no alcohol testing. They took blood from her the second time and she popped a .21.”

“Serious intoxication.”

“Yeah and there’s more. She was also positive for heroin and meth. No needle marks, so she sniffed. That’s a nasty combination, couldn’t have done much for her mental status.”

“I’ll call Andover and tell her. If she turns Zelda down, I’ll come up with something else.”

“You’re really carrying this woman, Alex. Is it something about her or just the kid?”

“Mostly the kid,” I said. “But maybe she’s also gotten to me — the plunge from what she was to who she is now. She was gorgeous, now she looks like a crone.”

“The street can do that to you.”

I said, “I need to disengage, huh?”

“Maybe if you do find out the kid’s okay, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“That doesn’t look likely.” I told him about striking out at boarding schools.

He said, “I figured you’d do something like that and I probably shouldn’t say anything, but that’s just the Golden State, there’re are forty-nine others. And what about them furrin countries — isn’t Switzerland full of fancy écoles? England, too, all those oldy-moldy piles of brick where they cane your bottom for kicks and turn you into a masochistic earl or whatever.”

I laughed. “I know, the whole idea’s ridiculous. The kid would need a trust fund.”

“You’re saying ridiculous but you’re thinking maybe before Zelda went completely nuts she set the kid up financially. One can always dream.”

“I shouldn’t pursue it.”

“My opinion’s gonna make a difference? Good luck.”

SubUrban’s Wikipedia listing described the show as “a vehicle for lowbrow, often vulgar, infrequently on-spot humor.” Mediocre ratings during the first season hadn’t prevented renewal because the network was searching for “edgy comedy aimed at attracting a younger audience.” Viewership increased a bit at the beginning of the second season but began to taper at the end. Cancellation came with no warning from the network.

The setting was an apartment building in a nameless midwestern city that served as the hub of a dysfunctional social grouping: a grumpy widower named Horace and his two children, a fifteen-year-old would-be lothario named (get it!!) Horner and an intellectually precocious, nunnish seventeen-year-old named (this you have to get!!!!) Virginia. The house pets Lou Sherman had cited were an inert, flatulent basset hound who supplied voiceover wisdom and a goldfish in a bowl who enjoyed faking death. Additional charm was supplied by neighbors: a Nigerian couple named Marvis and Bulski who dressed formally and believed themselves above it all, and a caricature-gay fireman named Chad-Michael-Anthony whose sleep patterns had been permanently destroyed by middle-of-the-night alarms. He’d installed a flagpole in his house in order to “practice my leg lock.”

Chad-M-A’s platonic roommate was the mandatory bombshell, Corinna, played by Zelda Chase clad in costumes that skewed toward lingerie. She’d projected the same triad of traits in every episode: glazed-eye intensity, serpentine body movements, monosyllabic utterances. All of which made her character the show’s most frequent object of ridicule.

She also got to work the flagpole.

I watched a scene featuring a lot of her, found it pathetic and creepy, searched for another, had the same reaction, and logged off. Copying down the cast list, I added the production company, H-S Partners, and the assistant who’d babysat Ovid, Karen Gallardo.

Nothing further on the actors but H-S had gone on to create a more successful series involving the wacky world of pest extermination called Spray Me.

One carryover from SubUrban: the goldfish.

Joel Hyson and Greer Strickland ran the company, currently headquartered in Culver City near the Sony lot. Proceeding alphabetically, I phoned and asked to speak to Hyson. An adenoidal receptionist who sounded around fourteen said, “In a meeting.”

“No prob, I’ll talk to Greer?”

“About what?”

“Zelda Chase.”

“Who?”

“She was on the cast of SubUrban.”

“She’s not on Spray.”

“I know that. I’m one of her doctors and I’m doing some follow-up.”

“Give me that name again, I’ll leave a message.”

Locating anyone else’s address bottomed out, with only Stevenson Beal, the actor who’d played Chad-Michael-Anthony, listed on a business directory because he had a new gig: real estate agent in Encino.

His voicemail insisted he was really interested in what anyone had to say. Emmy-caliber performance, but no place for him in the industry.

No justice in the world.

Expanding my boarding school search to five other states, I kept offering my bogus story with no success, saved the best for last and phoned Sherry Andover and told her about Zelda’s Bel Air arrest.

She said, “Sounds more aggressive than before... any actual physical contact?”

“None listed in the police report.”

“All right, I’ll give her the benefit. But I’ll be watchful, thanks, Doctor.”

“Appreciate it, Sherry.”

“If I tightened my criteria too much, I’d be empty and collecting unemployment.”

I took a longer-than-usual run, showered, dressed, and drove to LACBAR. This time, Yvette the receptionist managed a nod.

I said, “The boss back there?”

She rolled her eyes. “Boss. That’ll be the day.” She buzzed me in.

On the far side of the cubicle area, Kristin Doyle-Maslow perched atop a desk and held court for a group of six people. She saw me and waved expansively. To see it, you’d think we socialized regularly. I pretended not to notice and kept walking. She shouted, “Doctor!” loud enough to preclude my faking deafness.

I stopped. She crooked a finger at me. Come here, Junior.

I stared as if she were a sideshow curiosity. That creased her face and caused her to hop off the desk and come charging toward me.

When we were inches apart, she forced words out in a labored stage whisper, a sausage machine extruding links. “These. Are. County health managers. Gatekeepers. We need them. To get with the program. So we can mobilize outpatient services.”

“We.”

“The treatment community. Come over and meet them, you don’t have to say anything, just don’t diss me.”

I looked at her.

“Please,” she growled, destroying any etiquette value the word might have. “How can we help patients if we can’t net them?”

“I’m in no position to endorse—”

“Don’t endorse shit, just come over, I’ll do the talking.”

Six people were staring at me. I followed her over, smiled and stood by as she spieled about community needs, the advantages of outpatient care in the exciting new environment wrought by a meld of treatment advances, government funding, and private citizens combining to “combat mental illness as we all liaise and partner with localities in order to tailor caregiving to diverse, area-specific needs.”

Then she smiled at me and I knew she’d break her word. “This is Dr. Delaware, one of our local practitioners. He opted to partner with us in the brief treatment of a seriously ill street person who’d slipped through the cracks and is finally obtaining the care she needs. Because he gets what we’re about. In fact, he’s here now to see to her overall psychosocial needs and I hope we’ll be able to collaborate in the future on optimizing her multimodal care. Any questions for the doctor?”

A woman said, “What type of patient?”

I said, “Can’t discuss that.”

A man said, “What about ethnicity? Are you truly diverse?”

Kristin Doyle-Maslow said, “She’s a seriously ill patient and yes, we are.”

“Is she of color?”

I said, “Can’t discuss that.”

Another man said, “Are you doing something other than pushing meds? Is she being treated with cultural sensitivity?”

Kristin Doyle-Maslow said, “Absolutely. This particular patient—”

“Can’t be discussed,” I said.

A woman, now glaring at The Hyphen, said, “I appreciate your honoring confidentiality, Doctor.”

I said, “Glad you understand,” and walked away, feeling sullied.

Thank you, ladies and germs. Now I’ll balance a ball on my nose while barking “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

As I reached the door, I heard Kristin-Doyle Maslow say, “all about quality care. The absolute best specialists this city has to offer.”

Kevin Bracht answered my bell-push wearing the same clothes as last night and looking eroded. Zelda’s shoes were atop his desk. I took them.

“How’s the dog-and-pony show out there, Doc?”

“Rapidly producing piles of waste.”

He cracked up. “Along those lines, I thought of something else that’s messed up about this place. Patients get a toilet in their rooms but nurses don’t. I was lucky, there are those two unused cells, but if they were full up, I’d need to leave the unit to do my business. That tells me there’s no serious intention to ever use this place for inpatient, whole thing’s a joke, the sooner you get her out the better we’ll all be.”

“You bet, Kevin. Let’s see how she’s doing.”