When The Bough Breaks

9

At the time of his murder, Morton Handler had been in practice as a psychiatrist for a little under fifteen years. During that period he had consulted on or treated over two thousand patients. The records of these individuals were stored in manila folders and packed, one hundred and fifty to a box, in cardboard cartons that were taped shut and stamped with the L.A.P.D. seal.

Milo brought these boxes to my house, assisted by a slight, balding, black detective named Delano Hardy. Huffing and wheezing, they loaded the cartons in my dining room. Soon it looked as if I was either moving in or moving out.

"It's not as bad as it seems," Milo assured me. "You won't have to go through all of them. Right, Del?"

Hardy lit a cigarette and nodded assent.

"We've done some preliminary screening," he said. "We eliminated anyone known to be deceased. We figured they'd be low probability suspects."

The two of them laughed. Dark detective laughs.

"And the coroner's report," he continued, "says Handler and the girl were cut by someone with a lot of muscle. The throat wound on him went clear back to the spine on the first try."

"Which means," I interrupted, "a man."

"Could be one hell of a tough lady," laughed Hardy, "but we're betting on a male."

"There are six hundred male patients," added Milo. "Those four boxes over there."

"Also," said Hardy, "we brought you a little present."

He gave me a small package wrapped in green and red Christmas paper with a bugle and holly wreath pattern on it. It was tied with red ribbon.

"Couldn't find any other paper," Hardy explained.

"We hope you like it," added Milo. I began to feel as if I were the audience for a salt-and-pepper comedy team. A curious transformation had come over Milo. In the presence of another detective he had distanced himself from me and adopted the tough-wiseacre banter of the veteran cop.

I unwrapped the box and opened it. Inside, on a bed of cotton, was a plastic-coated L.A.P.D. identification badge. It bore a picture of me like the one on my driver's license, with that strange, frozen look that all official photos seem to have. Under the picture was my signature, also from my license, my name printed out, my degree and the title "Special Consultant." Life imitates art…

"I'm touched."

"Put it on," said Milo. "Make it official."

The badge wasn't unlike the one I had worn at Western Pediatric. It came with a clasp. I affixed it to my shirt collar.

"Very attractive," said Hardy. "That and ten cents might get you a local phone call." He reached into his jacket and drew out a folded piece of paper. "Now, if you'll just read and sign this." He held out a pen.

I read it, all small print.

"This says you don't have to pay me."

"Right," said Hardy with mock sadness. "And if you get a paper cut looking over the files you can't sue the department."

"It makes the brass happy, Alex," said Milo.

I shrugged and signed.

"Now," said Hardy, "you're an official consultant to the Los Angeles Police Department." He folded the paper and slipped it back in his pocket. "Just like the rooster who was jumping the bones of all the hens in the henhouse. So they castrated him and turned him into a consultant."

"That's very flattering, Del."

"Any friend of Milo and all that."

Milo, meanwhile, was opening the sealed cartons with a Swiss Army knife. He took out files in dozens and made neat little piles that covered the dining-room table.

"These are alphabetized, Alex. You can go through them and pull out the weird ones."

He finished setting things up and he and Hardy got ready to go.

"Del and I will be talking to bad guys off the NCIC printout."

"We've got our work cut out for us," said Hardy. He cracked his knuckles and looked for a place to put out his cigarette, which was smoked down to the filter.

"Toss it in the sink."

He left to do so.

When we were alone Milo said: "I really appreciate this, Alex. Don't drive yourself — don't try to get it all done today."

"I'll do as many as I can before the eyes start to blur."

"Right. We'll call you a couple of times today. To see if you've got anything we can pick up while we're on the road."

Hardy came back straightening his tie. He was dapper in a three-piece navy worsted suit, white shirt, blood-red tie, shiny black calfskin loafers. Next to him Milo looked more shopworn than ever in his sagging trousers and lifeless tweed sport coat.

"You ready, my man?" Hardy asked.

"Ready."

"Onward."

When they were gone I put a Linda Ronstadt record on the turntable. To the accompaniment of "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," I started to consult.

Eighty percent of the male patients in the files fell into two categories: affluent executive types referred by their internists due to a variety of stress-related symptoms — angina, impotence, abdominal pain, chronic headaches, insomnia, skin rashes of unknown origins — and depressed men of all ages. I reviewed these and put aside the remaining 20 percent for more detailed perusal.

I knew nothing about what kind of psychiatrist Morton Handler had been when I started, but after several hours of reviewing his charts I began to build an image of him — one that was far from saintly.

His therapy session notes were sketchy, careless, and so ambiguous as to be meaningless. It was impossible to know from reading them what he had done during those countless forty-five-minute hours. There was scant mention of treatment plans, prognoses, stress histories — anything that could be considered medically or psychologically relevant. This shoddiness was most evident in notes taken during the last five or six years of his life.

His financial records, on the other hand, were meticulous and detailed. His fees were high, his form letters to debtors strongly worded.

Though during the last few years he had done less talking and more prescribing, the rate at which he ordered medication wasn't unusual. Unlike Towle, he didn't appear to be a pusher. But he wasn't much of a therapist, either.

What really bothered me was his tendency, again more common during later years, to inject snide comments into the notes. These, which he didn't even bother to couch in jargon, were nothing more than sarcastic put-downs of his patients. "Likes to alternately whimper and simper" was the description of one older man with a mood disorder. "Unlikely to be capable of anything constructive" was his pronouncement on another. "Wants therapy as camouflage for a boring, meaningless life." "A real washout." And so on.

By late afternoon my psychological autopsy of Handler was complete. He was a burnout, one of the legions of worker ants who had grown to hate his chosen profession. He might have cared at one time — the early files were decent, if not inspired — but he hadn't by the end. Nevertheless, he had kept it up, day after day, session after session, unwilling to give up the six figure income and the perquisites of prosperity.

I wondered how he had occupied his time as his patients poured out their inner turmoil. Did he daydream? Engage in fantasies (sexual? financial? sadistic?)? Plan the evening's dinner menu? Do mental arithmetic? Count sheep? Compute how many manic depressives could dance on the head of a pin?

Whatever it had been, it hadn't included really listening to the human beings who sat before him believing he cared.

It made me think of the old joke, the one about the two shrinks who meet on the elevator at the end of the day. One of them is young, a novice, and he is clearly bedraggled — tie askew, hair messed, fraught with fatigue. He turns and notices that the other, a seasoned veteran, is totally composed — tan, fit, every hair in place, a fresh carnation stuck jauntily in his lapel.

"Doctor," beseeches the young one, "please tell me how you do it?"

"Do what, my son?"

"Sit, hour after hour, day after day, listening to people's problems without letting it get to you."

"Who listens?" replies the guru.

Funny. Unless you were shelling out ninety bucks a session to Morton Handler and getting a covert assessment as a simpering whimperer for your money.

Had one of the subjects of his nasty prose somehow discovered the sham and murdered him? It was difficult to imagine someone engaging in the kind of butchery that had been visited upon Handler and his girlfriend in order to avenge a peeve of that kind. But you never knew. Rage was a tricky thing; sometimes it lay dormant for years, only to be triggered by a seemingly trivial stimulus. People had been ripped apart over a nudged car bumper.

Still I found it hard to believe that the depressives and psychosomaticizers whose files I had reviewed were the stuff of which midnight skulkers were fashioned. What I really didn't want to believe was that there were two thousand potential suspects to deal with.

It was close to five. I pulled a Coors out of the refrigerator, took it out to the balcony and lay down on a lounge, my feet propped up on the guardrail. I drank and watched the sun dip beneath the tops of the trees. Someone in the neighborhood was playing punk rock. Strangely enough it didn't seem discordant.

At five-thirty Robin called,

"Hi, hon. You want to come over? Key Largo's on tonight."

"Sure," I said. "Should I pick up anything to eat?"

She thought a moment.

"How about chili dogs? And beer."

"I've got a head start on the beer." Three squashed Coors empties sat on the kitchen counter.

"Give me time to catch up, love. See you around seven."

I hadn't heard from Milo since one-thirty. He'd called in from Bellflower, just about to interrogate a guy who'd assaulted seven women with a screwdriver. Very little similarity to the Handler case but you had to work with what you had.

I phoned West L.A. Division and left the message for him that I'd be out for the evening.

Then I called Bonita Quinn's number. I waited for five rings and when nobody answered, hung up.

Humphrey and Lauren were great, as usual. The chili dogs left us belching, but satisfied. We held each other and listened to Tal Farlow and Wes Montgomery for a while. Then I picked up one of the guitars she had lying around the studio and played for her. She listened, eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips, then gently removed my hands from the instrument and pulled me to her.

I had planned to stay the night but at eleven I grew restless.

"Is anything the matter, Alex?"

"No." Just my Zeigarnik tugging at me.

"It's the case, isn't it?"

I said nothing.

"I'm starting to worry about you, sweetie." She put her head on my chest, a welcome burden. "You've been so edgy since Milo got you into all of this. I never knew you before, but from what you told me it sounds like the old days."

"The old Alex wasn't such a bad guy," I reacted defensively.

She was wisely silent.

"No," I corrected myself. "The old Alex was a bore. I promise not to bring him back, okay?"

"Okay." She kissed the tip of my chin.

"Just give me a little time to get through this."

"All right."

But as I dressed she looked at me with a combination of worry, hurt, and confusion. When I started to say something, she turned away. I sat down on the edge of the bed and took her in my arms. I rocked her until her arms slid around my neck.

"I love you," I said. "Give me a little time."

She made a warm sound and held me tighter.

When I left her she was sleeping, her eyelids fluttering in the throes of the first dream of the night.

I tore into the one hundred and twenty files I had set aside, working until the early morning hours. Most of these turned out also to be rather mundane documents. Ninety-one of the patients were physically ill men whom Handler had seen as a consultant when he was still working at Cedars-Sinai as part of the liaison psychiatry team. Another twenty had been diagnosed schizophrenic, but they turned out to be senile (median age, seventy-six) patients at a convalescent hospital where he'd worked for a year.

The remaining nine men were of interest. Handler had diagnosed them all as psychopathic character disorders. Of course those diagnoses were suspect, as I had little faith in his judgment. Nevertheless the files were worth examining more closely.

They were all between the ages of sixteen and thirty-two. Most had been referred by agencies — the Probation Department, the California Youth Authority, local churches. A couple had experienced several scrapes with the law. At least three were judged violent. Of these, one had beaten up his father, another had stabbed a fellow high school student, and the third had used an automobile to run down someone with whom he'd exchanged angry words.

A bunch of real sweethearts.

None of them had been involved in therapy for very long, which was not surprising. Psychotherapy hasn't much to offer the person with no conscience, no morals, and, quite often, no desire to change. In fact, the psychopath by his very nature is an affront to modern psychology, with its egalitarian and optimistic philosophical underpinnings.

Therapists become therapists because down deep they feel that people are really good and have the capacity to change for the better. The notion that there exist individuals who are simply evil — bad people — and that such evil cannot be explained by any existing combination of nature or nurture is an assault upon a therapist's sensitivities. The psychopath is to the psychologist and the psychiatrist what the terminal cancer patient is to the physician: walking, breathing evidence of hopelessness and failure.

I knew such evil people existed. I had seen a mercifully small number of them, mostly adolescents, but some children. I remember one boy, in particular, not yet twelve years old, but possessed of a cynical, hardened, cruelly grinning face that would have done a San Quentin lifer proud. He'd handed me his business card — a bright rectangle of shocking pink paper with his name on it, followed by the single word Enterprises.

And an enterprising young man he had been. Buttressed by my assurances of confidentiality, he had told me proudly, of the dozens of bicycles he had stolen, of the burglaries he had pulled off, of the teenage girls he had seduced. He was so pleased with himself.

He had lost his parents in a plane crash at the age of four and had been brought up by a baffled grandmother who tried to assure everyone — and herself — that down deep he was a good boy. But he wasn't. He was a bad boy. When I asked him if he remembered his mother, he leered and told me she looked like a real piece of ass in the pictures he had seen. It wasn't defensive posturing. It was really him.

The more time I spent with him, the more discouraged I grew. It was like peeling an onion and finding each inner layer more rotten than the last. He was a bad boy, irredeemably so. Most likely, he would get worse.

And there was nothing I could do. There was little doubt he would end up establishing an anti-social career. If society was lucky, it would be limited to con games. If not, a lot of blood would be shed. Logic dictated that he should be locked up, kept out of harm's way, incarcerated for the protection of the rest of us. But democracy said otherwise, and, on balance, I had to admit it shouldn't be any other way.

Still, there were nights when I thought of that eleven-year-old and wondered if I'd be seeing his name in the papers one day.

I set the nine files aside.

Milo would have more of his work cut out for him.