The Museum of Desire

Chapter 31

The house was a two-story white Georgian Revival with a black door and matching shutters. Ungated succulent garden in front, double-width driveway, a silver Mercedes taking up half.

At the front door, Milo let a bronze, lion-shaped knocker fall on solid wood.

A maid in a black-and-white lace uniform opened. “Yes?”

Milo’s badge made her step back. “Is Crispin home?”

“One min.”

The door shut for two and a half minutes before opening on a pretty blond woman in her forties wearing pink velour sweats and black-and-white checked sneakers. The pale end of blond, a smidge past gray, thick mop of it, pushed back from an unlined forehead by a rhinestone band. A scrunchy circled one wrist, a fitness watch the other.

She said, “I’m about to head for the gym. Police? Why in the world?”

Milo said, “Are you Crispin’s mom?”

“I am.” Quick glance toward the house. Trembling lips.

“Sorry to bother you but we’ve had a complaint about Crispin.”

“I see.” Unsurprised. “What’d he do? Say something inappropriate to an overly sensitive teacher or student?”

“A little more than that.”

Pink velour shoulders rose. “Meaning?”

“Our report is he threatened some other students. Is he home?”

She slid a silver nail under the rim of her watchband. Flicked leather a couple of times. “It’s complicated. You can’t just approach him like everyone.”

“Could we talk to him in front of you?”

“Who’d he supposedly threaten?”

“Could we talk inside, ma’am?”

“Don’t you need a warrant?”

“We could come back with one, ma’am. But if it turns out to be nothing, why make a big deal and have it recorded as an incident on Crispin’s record?”

“Hmm.” Freeing the nail and inspecting her cuticle, she began stepping in place. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen: You’ll talk to me first and if I approve of your approach — and if Crispin’s receptive — we can reach out to him. With sensitivity.”

“More than reasonable, Ms.—”

“Haley Moman.” Eyelash flutter. “I used to be Haley Hartford.”

As if we were expected to know that.

Both of us faked it and said, “Sure,” at the same time.

That made her smile.

She said, “C’mon in, guys.”

The house was a precisely calibrated mix of taupe and aqua. A taxidermy shark took up one high wall, a wooden frame filled with stuffed teddy bears, another. Wall three hosted a scatter of family photos: Haley Moman née Hartford, blow-dried, shorter than her by half a head, and a boy, always caught with his head down, features obscured by long, lank, tan hair.

Wall four was a life-sized painting of Haley Moman née Hartford in a strapless silver gown with an abdominal cutout that honored her navel.

“Taken from a red-carpet shot at the Emmys,” she said. “Back in the back-then. Wait here.”

She crossed the living room and an adjoining dining room, passed through what was likely a kitchen door, and returned moments later holding a bottle of Vitaminwater.

Milo muttered, “No graham crackers, shucks.”

Haley Moman said, “Pardon?”

“Nice house.”

“We try.” Sitting down with the poise of a yoga master, she dangled one leg over the other and swung it from the ankle down, uncapped the bottle, and took a long swallow.

“Okay, go. What’s the alleged claim?”

Milo showed her the tweets.

She said, “This reads like teenage garbage — and this part about the doctors is absolutely nothing dangerous. Crispin is reflecting his reality. He’s always being trucked around to appointments. Allergist, pediatrician, ENT, orthodontist, behavioral optometrist.” A beat. She bit her lip. “His psychotherapist. So you see we are aware that he’s got issues. But this? It’s a joke.”

She handed the paper back to Milo. “Really, guys, I can’t believe you’re wasting your time on something so childish.”

Milo said, “According to the complainant, ‘MD’ doesn’t refer to medical doctors. It’s Crispin’s code for ‘Must Die.’ ”

“His code? Nonsense,” said Haley Moman. But her voice lacked conviction.

I said, “Does Crispin have strong computer skills?”

“Isn’t he entitled to a plus? Yes, he’s great with computers.”

“So he’s used to codes and coding.”

“Oh, please. That’s advanced math and whatever, this is a stupid letter thing. To me ‘MD’ means ‘medical doctor’ and until you can prove different, that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

Milo looked at me.

I said, “We’re really sorry if this is upsetting you but as a parent you can see that we need to follow up.”

“On the basis of this?”

“The complainant said Crispin also made verbal threats.”

“Where?”

“At school.”

“Hah. As if he’s there often enough to even talk to anyone — you need to understand, Crispin’s different but not in a bad way, he’s just different. Until his senior year, he was homeschooled. His therapist felt he needed a social experience before college, even with the adjustment challenges that were likely to occur. We go by what she says. She’s brilliant, a professor at the U., a doctorate from Yale. So please excuse me for trusting her and not this.”

“Could we talk to her?”

“Absolutely not — oh, hell, why not, she’s only going to back up what I’m saying. Dr. Marlene Sontag. Go for it.”

Lucky break. Someone I knew and liked.

I said, “Could you please call Dr. Sontag and give your consent?”

“You bet, sir. You bet. Now can we end this and let me get to the gym?”

“We were also told Crispin had issues with animals.”

Haley Moman’s eyes zipped to the right. Lowered. Aimed at her lap and stayed that way. “Oh, Jesus — I thought that was resolved.”

I said nothing.

“I can’t believe this — it was a squirrel for God’s sake. They’re disgusting rodents, they carry diseases. It might as well have been a rat. They’re basically rats with fluffy tails.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” said Haley Moman. “This was months ago. Right after Crispin began at Beverly. During lunchtime, that’s all, nothing disruptive in class. Out on the lawn. Do you think anyone would take the time to reach out since the time he got there? As if. So he was all by himself, eating, and a stupid squirrel ran up to him and bared its teeth. Blatant. Aggressive. I mean that’s not normal, right? Normally they’re afraid of people, right? So this one had to be sick. Maybe even rabies. Or some other horrible disease.”

I said, “Crispin felt threatened.”

“Wouldn’t you? I mean, let’s face it, everyone’s into animals nowadays. I don’t mind, I gave up my furs. But animals aren’t perfect, there are mean ones just like there are mean people, and this one was obviously vicious. Baring its teeth unprovoked at a child? What was Crispin supposed to do, sit there and get mauled?”

“What did he do?”

She tented her fingers then ran them down the sides of a perfectly styled nose. “What did he do? He protected himself.”

“How?”

Her eyes dropped down again. “Look. I had no idea he had it with him. It was a gift from his grandpa. My dad, he ranches cattle in Montana, to him, a knife’s a tool. This was a stupid little two-inch blade for whittling. Dad gave it to Crispin when Crispin turned six. We took it away because we’re fiercely anti any sort of weapon. Crispin must’ve found it.”

Milo said, “So no firearms in the house.”

“Of course not!” said Haley Moman. Appalled, as if he’d suggested she was old. “No instruments of destruction, period.”

Her chest heaved. “From the beginning, we knew Crispin deserved special consideration. That means zero tolerance.”

“Crispin got hold of the knife.”

She threw up her hands. “I kept it ’cause of my dad, hid it in my bathing suit drawer, somehow he found it. He said it was just for that day, he was planning to pick up a tree branch and whittle — he tries to be artistic. So he had it with him and he ended up using it.”

“On the squirrel.”

Haley Moman faced me, cheeks flushed, brown eyes narrowed. “The stupid thing was baring its teeth at him, he felt threatened. For all we know he was in danger of being exposed to the plague or something. So he used it. So big deal.”

I said, “You’re making a good point about disease. Did Animal Control ever analyze the body to see if it was infected?”

No reaction from Haley Moman. Then she tugged at her hair, picked up her water bottle, uncapped, recapped. Put it down hard on a taupe travertine table.

“No,” she said. “There wasn’t much left to analyze.”

She ran out. This time she was gone for a while, returning with her eyes raw, her hair loose, clutching a fresh water bottle.

During her absence, Milo had done some research. Twenty years ago, Haley Hartford had worn a blood-red bathing suit for two seasons of a show called Tideline. First marriage to an actor who’d O.D.’d. A couple of boyfriends in between the marriage to Adrian Moman. Crispin’s age said Moman was likely his stepdad.

“All right,” she said, tossing the hair. “Crispin has agreed to meet with you.”

Secretary clearing the boss’s calendar.

Milo said, “Great,” and we stood.

“But,” said Haley Moman, “you must stick to only relevant topics and avoid nonsense.”

“Such as?”

“I’ll direct you.” She racewalked toward the rear of the house, speeding past three bedrooms on both sides of a skylit corridor. At the back, a space the width of the entire structure was set up with aqua leather theater seats and a hundred-inch screen on one side, a wet bar and a pool table backed by a floor-to-ceiling aquarium filled with marine fish on the other. Taupe drapes covered every window. Light courtesy dimmed LEDs in the ceiling.

All those toys still allowed for plenty of square footage in the center of the room. A queen-sized bed shared the space with a black leather Eames chair and six feet of Lucite bent into an upside-down U. Atop the Lucite: two laptops, three twenty-inch screens, half a dozen Rubik’s cubes, and a large, yellow softcover book.

On the bed, his scrawny butt barely taking up a corner of mattress, perched a pitiably thin, undersized boy with long, straight hair colored a curiously waxy tan. Spidery soft-looking fingers rested on bony knees. Skin so pallid and blue-veined it verged on translucent.

Crispin Moman was seventeen and a half but could’ve passed for fourteen.

This time he revealed his face, expressionless but for the merest sense of expectancy in narrow-set gray eyes. His features were well set but skimpy, as if a sculptor had roughed in then run out of clay. The exception, his eyes, purplish blue, luminous, and huge, fringed by long curling lashes.

The oddly colored hair was cut in a pageboy with straight-edge bangs that bisected a high, white brow. Already sporting brow lines his mother had avoided through lucky genetics or botulin toxin. He wore a dark-green polyester jumpsuit that evoked an old guy loafing in Palm Springs decades ago. Ralph embroidered across the right breast. Black wingtips, no socks. Four red strings banded a flimsy-looking wrist.

He looked at us but didn’t seem to see us.

Haley Moman said, “They’re here, honey.”

Crispin didn’t react.

She looked at us and wagged a warning finger. Don’t push it.

Milo walked over and faced the boy. “Crispin, I’m Milo.”

Without looking up, Crispin said, “What’s your title?”

“Pardon?”

“Your real identity has a title.” Nasal voice, tremolo modulation, the volume dialed a smidge too high.

“Lieutenant.”

Crispin Moman said, “Lieutenant Milo...?”

“Sturgis.”

“Lieutenant. Milo. Sturgis.” One of the hands extended.

Milo took it and shook gently. The boy’s fingers held on until Milo unpeeled them, then flopped back to their knee-perch.

“My identity is Crispin Bernard Moman.”

Milo grinned. “How ’bout that. Mine is actually Milo Bernard Sturgis.”

Haley Moman shot him a doubtful look. Lying to manipulate my child?

Crispin said, “You didn’t include that initially.”

“Don’t use the middle name much, Crispin.”

“Incomplete data,” said the boy. “Can lead to errors.”

“Ah.”

Without acknowledging me, Crispin said, “What’s your full identity?”

“Alexander Dumas Delaware. I go by Alex.”

Milo gaped. He’d never known about the flight of literary fancy cooked up by my mother before the postpartum depression set in and never left. Leaving me to be disparaged throughout my childhood as “sissy-boy Froggy” by my violent sot of a father.

The initials didn’t help, either: A.D.D. I’d tired of the ridicule at school, abandoned the offending “D” on my Missouri driver’s license and every document since.

Haley said, “Bernard is my dad. Crispin likes going to Montana to visit him.”

Crispin picked up the book and began reading.

Milo said, “Do you know why we’re here?”

“I threatened Todd and Shirin.”

Haley said, “He means you think that.”

Crispin said, “I mean I know that.”

Milo said, “So you did it.”

“Of course I did it.”

“Todd and Shirin got pretty upset.”

“That was the goal.”

“To make them upset.”

“Yes.”

“Because...”

“I hate them,” said Crispin. “They hate me. Expecting pleasantries in a situation like that is unrealistic.”

“Would you ever act out on the threats?”

Haley said, “Of course not!”

Her son regarded her as if she was beyond reasoning with.

Milo said, “Crispin, would you ever—”

“No. It’s an inefficient and stupid strategy.”

“How so?”

The boy’s withering glance shifted to us. “Why would I endanger my freedom for the short-term pleasure of harming them? At least not under current circumstances.”

Haley said, “Oh, Crispin, stop screwing around and just tell them the truth.”

“I’m being truthful. Mother. In the current situation, all of us being adolescents, there’s zero probability I’d act out.”

I said, “But?”

“Three of us on a deserted island together, enough food for only one? Or two? I’d do my best to survive.”

Haley said, “That’s a fantasy, Crispin. Give them reality. Please.”

“Then excluding fantasy, there’s no probability of harm. I attempted to arouse them because they — he, actually, not she — was acting out against me verbally.”

I said, “Shirin was okay.”

“Neutral,” said Crispin. “No hostility, no expression of support. I included her because she’s meaningful to him and I wanted to strike at his core.”

Sudden, lopsided smile. “Apparently, I’ve succeeded.”

Haley said, “You have, Crispin, but you need to stop.”

Long silence. She wrung her hands.

Crispin said, “Okay.”

Milo said, “Okay what?”

“I’ll stop.”

“Completely.”

“That’s what stop means, Milo Bernard Sturgis comma Lieutenant. There’s no rheostat, it’s either or.”

“Good.”

“Not good or bad,” said Crispin. “Reality. There’ll be no need for you to return and worry Haley. I won’t be going back there.”

“To Beverly Hills High School?”

“Honey, I thought we agreed you’d try to—”

“Circumstances have changed, Haley. It hasn’t been positive and is unlikely to become positive. I can learn more by myself.”

“But the counselor said Harvard and Yale—”

“The counselor went to Pitzer,” said Crispin, sneering. “I’ll follow my own judgment.”

He looked at Milo. “No need to come back and cause her stress, M.B.S. comma L.”

Milo said, “If you don’t give us reason to come back we won’t.”

The boy held up a hand. “Promise-pledge-swear. If it makes you feel better, bring me a holy book and I’ll place my hand on it.”

“Are you religious?”

“I believe in belief.”

“So no more threats?”

“Nary a one.” The boy smiled at his own phrasing. “Nary.” As if tasting the word. “Nary more scary.”

Milo said, “Fair enough,” and extended his hand.

Crispin said, “We already did that but all right.” This time he was the first to let go.

“Thanks, Crispin.”

“For what?”

“Talking to us.”

“I talk to people. I’m not a robot.” Leveling the purplish eyes at his mother.

She said, “Of course, honey.”

Another condescending smile aimed her way.

We turned to leave.

Crispin said, “They pretend to be adults but they’re not.”

“Who?”

“He and she, the party people. They pretended the party was all theirs but they were lying, it wasn’t.”

I said, “How do you know?”

“After they barred my entry I planned to conduct a commemoration of the confrontations. I walked over there and saw parents so I knew I didn’t have to bother.”

Haley Moman said, “You went over there? Ohmigod.”

Crispin said, “Don’t waste anxiety on events that didn’t occur.”

Milo said, “What were you planning to do?”

The boy’s lopsided smile reappeared and grew, filling the entire span of his lips. Gradually, as if joy were a gas that could inflate tissue.

Haley said, “Do I want to know this?”

“No, but they do,” said Crispin. “The plan was to deposit a large bowel movement on the property. At the entrance where stepping in it was most likely.”

His mother gasped.

Crispin flashed a V-sign. “I brought toilet paper and was going to also leave the used portions. Then I saw the parents and realized the plan should be aborted because they were liars and barring me had been a false gesture of dominance. So why bother donating my body chemistry to insignificant ants?”

“Oh, Jesus.” Haley hung her head.

I said, “How many parents did you see?”

“A mother and a father.”

“You knew they were parents because...”

“They weren’t adolescents. Their shape was adult, they walked with adult confidence and drove off.”

“Did you see their car?”

“It was dark,” said Crispin. “I heard it so it was there. Then it wasn’t because they left.”

“Did you hear these people say anything?”

“No.”

“Which way did they go?”

“North.”

“When did this happen, Crispin?”

“Exactly Saturday, exactly two fifty-eight a.m.”

Haley said, “You left the house at three in the morning?”

“I do it when I can’t sleep.”

“Oh, Crispin—”

“You take your Lunesta and he takes his Ambien. You know what I think about medication, Haley.”

“Being out there at night is more dangerous than medication.”

“I challenge that idea, Haley. Vehicle traffic is infrequent and I stay away from the road.”

“But in the dark, by yourself—”

“The dark is neutral. There are no people. One time I saw a raccoon. We looked at each other and went our separate ways. I’ve also seen deer. They’re afraid of me. Even the large ones.”

“I can’t believe this — where do you go in the middle of the night?”

“Early morning. Typically I walk around our backyard. Atypically when I remain wide awake, I go outside in front and walk a few paces south or a few paces north. This was the first time I had a goal and a destination.”

I said, “Wanting to make a statement.”

“A gastrointestinal statement. At dinner, I ate a lot of fiber.” To his mother: “Remember? The chili and the salad and then cereal? You approved of my having a good appetite.”

“Oh, Crispin!”

“When I saw the parents and felt better about how pathetic he and she are, I knew it was time to change the plan. The fiber was working and I made it back here just in time and used my toilet. Then I sprayed that organic orange spray you like, Haley, and took a shower and went to bed.”

His mother rocked and placed a hand on her temple. “I feel a migraine coming on, we need to end this.”

Milo said, “Just a coupla more questions. These parents, Crispin, what did they look like?”

Blank stare.

“Son—”

Haley said, “He has no idea.”

Milo said, “Tall, short, fat, skinny—”

Blank stare.

“Hair color?”

Silence.

“Clothing?”

No response.

“Is there anything you can recall?”

Emotionless head shake.

From voluble to mute. As if the boy’s brain waves had changed.

Haley Moman got between Milo and her son. “This is over. You have to leave now.”

Crispin returned to his book.

“Out,” she said, pointing to the door and staying close behind us as we retraced toward the front of the house.

Back in the living room, she said, “You need to understand: He has zero facial recognition. By now, he’s forgotten what you look like so don’t waste your time and mine.”

She flung her front door open. “You’re not going to make troubles for him, right? He’s obviously no danger to anyone.”

Milo said, “So far so good.”

“What does that mean?”

“Now that you’re aware, I’m sure you’ll be paying close attention—”

“Like I don’t already? Like I haven’t been paying attention every single day since he started to show his differences? You people are unbelievable.”

She glared from her doorway. Held the pose as we drove away.

Milo said, “Making new friends every day. So the kid sees a man and a woman early Saturday morning right before three. The timing’s right.”

I said, “A two-person job like we thought. One of them drove the limo, the other brought a second vehicle for getaway.”

“And I’ve got an eyewitness who can’t recognize faces.” He laughed. “Some kid. What do you think about his dangerousness? I don’t see grounds for any kind of charge and now that he’s going back to homeschooling, I can’t see involving BHPD.”

“A few coded messages and no weapons in the house? No action would be taken. Like you said, all she can do is keep an eye on him.”

A mile later, he said, “There was that squirrel. Then again, he and the raccoon parted ways amicably. Poor thing. Her. From a beach hottie to that. But enough compassion, time to redouble on Okash and Weird Beard.”