Four Classic Alex Delaware Thrillers 4-Book Bundle

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The fugues were preceded by a pressing drive for complete physical escape, an almost sensual pressure to bolt. Impulsive travel soon followed: The patient would put on a wig, get in her “party clothes,” jump in her car, get onto the nearest freeway, and drive aimlessly, often for hundreds of miles, without itinerary, “not even listening to music, just the sound of my own hot blood pumping.”

  Sometimes the car “took” her to the airport, where she used a credit card to book a flight at random. Other times she stayed on the road. In either case, the jaunts usually ended in debauchery: an excursion to San Francisco that climaxed with a three-day orgy of “meth sniffing and righteous group gropes with a bunch of Angels in Golden Gate Park.” Pill-eating in a Manhattan disco, followed by skin-popping heroin in a South Bronx shooting gallery. Orgies in various European cities, assignations with derelicts and “head-case street pickups.”

  And a “righteous skin groove.” Making a pornographic movie “somewhere out in Florida. Fucking and sucking like a superstar.”

  The “parties” always ended in drug-induced blackout during which Jana retreated and J. woke up, oblivious to everything her “twin” had done.

  This ability to split was the crux of the patient’s problem, Sharon decided, and she targeted it for therapeutic assault. J.’s ego had to be integrated, the “twins” drawn closer and closer, eventually confronting each other, reaching some sort of rapprochement, and merging into one fully functioning identity.

  A potentially traumatic process, she acknowledged, unsupported by much clinical data. Very few therapists claimed to have actually integrated multiple personalities, so the prognosis for change was poor. But Kruse encouraged her, supporting her theory that, since these multiples were identical “twins,” they shared a “psychic core” and would be amenable to fusion.

  During hypnosis she began introducing J. to small bites of Jana: brief glimpses of drives down a highway, a signpost or hotel room that Jana had mentioned. Camera-shutter exposures of neutral material that could be easily withdrawn if the patient’s anxiety rose too high.

  J. tolerated this well—no outward signs of anxiety, though she didn’t respond to any of the Jana material and disobeyed Sharon’s post-hypnotic suggestion that she recall these details. The following session was identical: no memory, no response at all. Sharon tried again. Nothing. Session after session. Blank wall. Despite the patient’s previous suggestibility, she was completely noncompliant. Determined, apparently, that the “twins” would never meet.

  Surprised at the strength of the patient’s resistance, Sharon wondered if she’d been wrong about twinship making integration easier. Perhaps just the opposite was true: The fact that J. and Jana were physically identical, but psychological mirror opposites, had intensified their rivalry.

  She began researching the psychology of twins, especially identicals, consulted Kruse, then took another tack: continuing to hypnotize the patient but backing away from attempts at integration. Instead, she adopted a more chummy role, simply chatting with the patient about seemingly innocuous topics: female siblings, twins, identicals. Leading J. through dispassionate discussions—was there really a special bond between twins, and if so, what was its nature? What was the best way to raise twins as children? How much of the behavioral similarity between identicals was due to heredity, how much to genetics?

  “Riding with the resistance,” she termed it. Taking careful note of the patient’s body language and speech tones, synchronizing her own movements with them.

  Exploiting the hidden message, in accordance with Dr. P. P. Kruse’s theory of communication dynamics.

  This went on for several more months; at a casual glance, nothing more than two friends gabbing. But the patient responded to the shift in strategy by slipping deeper than ever into hypnosis. Showing such profound suggestibility that she developed total skin anesthesia to a lit match, eventually adjusting her breathing to the cadence of Sharon’s speech. Appearing ready for direct suggestion. But Sharon never offered one, just kept on chatting.

  Then, during the fifty-fourth session, the patient slipped spontaneously into the Jana role and began describing a wild night that had taken place in Italy—a party at a private villa in Venice, peopled by weird, grinning characters and fed by flowing booze, abundant dope.

  At first just another Jana orgy tale, every prurient detail recounted with relish. Then, halfway into the story, something else.

  “My sister’s there,” Jana said, amazed. “A fucking wall-flower over in that corner, in that ugly unvarnished chair.”

  Sharon: “What’s she feeling?”

  “Terrified. Scared shitless. Men are sucking her nipples—naked, hairy. Baboons—they’re swarming over her, sticking things into her.”

  Sharon: “Things?”

  “Their things. Their scummy things. They’re hurting her and laughing and there’s the camera.”

  Sharon: “Where’s the camera?”

  “There, on the other side of the room. I’m—oh, no, I’m holding it, I want to see everything, the lights are all on. But she doesn’t like it. But I’m filming her anyway. I can’t stop.”

  As she continued to describe the scene, Jana’s voice faltered and quivered. She described J. as “exactly like … looking exactly like me, but, you know, more innocent. She was always more innocent. They’re really going at her. I feel …”

  Sharon: “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Sharon: “What did you feel, Jana? When you saw what was happening to your sister?”

  “Nothing.” Pause. “Bad.”

  Sharon: “Very bad?”

  “A … a little bad.” Angry expression. “But it was her own fucking fault! Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, right? She shouldn’t have gone if she didn’t want to play, right?”

  Sharon: “Did she have a choice, Jana?”

  Pause. “What do you mean?”

  Sharon: “Did J. have a choice about going to the party?”

  Long silence.

  Sharon: “Jana?”

  “Yeah. I heard you. First I thought yeah, sure she did—everyone has a choice. Then, I …”

  Sharon: “What, Jana?”

  “I don’t know—I mean I really don’t know her. I mean we’re exactly the same but there’s something about her that … I don’t know. It’s like we’re—I don’t know—more than sisters. I don’t know what the right word is, maybe part—Forget it.”

  Pause.

  Sharon: “Partners?”

  Jana, startled: “I said forget it, enough of this shit! Let’s talk about fun stuff, what I was doing at the fucking party.”

  Sharon: “All right. What were you doing?”

  Jana, baffled; after a long silence: “I don’t … remember. Aw, it was probably boring anyway—any party she’d go to had to be.”

  A door had been opened; Sharon restrained herself from nudging it further. She let Jana ramble on, waited until all her anger dissipated, then ended the session, certain that a breakthrough had taken place. For the first time in more than three years, J. had allowed the twins to coexist. And had offered a new clue: The word partner seemed to have strong emotional loading. Sharon decided to pursue that, brought it up the next time she hypnotized J.

  “What’s that, doctor? What did you just say?”

  Sharon: “Partners. I suggested that you and Jana are something more than just sisters. Or even twins. Perhaps you’re partners. Psychological partners.”

  J. is thoughtful, silent, starts to smile.

  Sharon: “What’s funny, J.?”

  “Nothing. I suppose you’re right—you usually are.”

  Sharon: “But does it make sense to you?”

  “I suppose so, though if she is my partner, she’s certainly a silent one. We never talk. She refuses to talk to me.” Pause. Her smile widens. “Silent partners. What business are we in?”

  Sharon: “The business of living.”

  J., amused: “I suppose so
.”

  Sharon: “Would you like to talk more about that? About being a silent partner?”

  J.: “I don’t know. I guess so … Maybe not. No. She’s so rude and unpleasant, I really can’t tolerate being around her. Let’s change the subject, if you don’t mind.”

  J. didn’t show up for the next session, or the next. When she finally reappeared, two months later, she seemed composed, claimed her life was going great, she just needed a tune-up.

  Sharon resumed hypnotherapy, continued her attempt to get the “twins” to meet. Five more months of frustration, during which Sharon began thinking of herself as a failure, wondered if J.’s needs couldn’t be better served by another therapist, “one with more experience, perhaps a male.”

  But Kruse encouraged her to continue, advising still more reliance on nonverbal manipulation.

  Another month of status quo and J. disappeared once again. Five weeks later she materialized, bursting into the office while Sharon was seeing another patient, calling that woman a “fucking wimp,” telling her, “your problems don’t mean diddly,” and ordering her out of the office.

  Despite Sharon’s attempt to take charge of the situation, the other patient ran out crying. Sharon told J. never to do that again. J. became Jana and accused Sharon of being “an evil and selfish cunt. You’re a fucking manipulating cunt out to get everything I own, everything I am. All you want to do is bleed me fucking dry!” After threatening to sue Sharon and ruin her, she stormed out of the office.

  And never returned.

  End of treatment. Time for the failing therapist to ruminate.

  A hundred-page discussion section. A hundred pages of Monday-morning quarterbacking. The end point: Sharon’s realization that her attempt to reconcile J. and Jana had been doomed to failure at the outset because the “twins” were “intractable psychic enemies; the triumph of one necessitated the death of the other—a psychological death, but one that had to be so vivid, so decisive that it might have been a literal demise.”

  Instead of seeking integration, she realized now, she should have worked at strengthening good J.’s identity, teamed up with the good twin to destroy the “destructive, flagrantly disturbed Jana.”

  “There’s no room,” she concluded, “in this young woman’s psyche for any type of partner, let alone the conflictual, silent partners represented by the splits of her personality. The nature of human identity is such that the business of living is, must be, a solitary process. Lonely at times, but enriched by the strength and satisfaction that comes from self-determination and a fully integrated ego.

  “Alone, we’re born; alone, we die.”

  One hell of a case. If there had ever been a case.

  I knew J. I’d made love to her, danced with her out on a terrace.

  I knew Jana, too, had watched her throw strawberry daiquiris against a fireplace, wiggle out of a flame-colored dress and do with me what she wanted.

  A chapter on the psychology of twins, yet never once had Sharon acknowledged in print that she had a twin. Her own silent partner.

  Denial? Deceit?

  Autobiography.

  She’d delved into her own tormented psyche, created a phony case history and passed it off as doctoral research.

  Working it through. Some sort of avant-garde therapy?

  Just like the porn loop.

  Kruse had been her chairman.

  It stank of Kruse.

  But what of Shirlee? The real silent partner. Had Sharon abandoned her to a silent, dark world?

  And who the hell was “Jasper”?

  And deep thanks to Alex, who, even in his absence, continues to inspire me.

  Demure, passive, ladylike “J.” Old-fashioned views about sex and romance … though she’d been sexually active with a man she cared deeply about … the relationship ending after intrusion by Jana.

  I hefted the dissertation. Four hundred-plus pages of soul-dredging, pseudoscholarship. Lies.

  How the hell had she gotten away with it?

  I thought I knew a way to find out.

  Chapter

  26

  Before I left, I called Olivia’s office.

  “Sorry, darling, system’s still down. Maybe by the end of the day.”

  “Okay, thanks. I’ll call you later.”

  “One more thing—that hospital you were looking for in Glendale? I spoke to a friend of mine, used to work at Glendale Adventist. She said there was a place on Brand named Resthaven Terrace that closed down just recently. She used to consult to them, doing their Medi-Cal management.”

  “Closed down completely?”

  “That’s what Arlene said.”

  “Where can I reach Arlene?”

  “St. John’s, in Santa Monica. Assistant director of social services. Arlene Melamed.”

  She gave me the number and said, “You’re really hot to find this Shirlee gal, aren’t you?”

  “It’s complicated, Olivia.”

  “It always is with you.”

  I called Arlene Melamed’s office and used Olivia’s name to get through her secretary. Seconds later, a woman with a strong voice said, “Mrs. Melamed.”

  I introduced myself, told her I was trying to trace a former patient who’d been at Resthaven Terrace.

  “Treated when, Doctor?”

  “Six years ago.”

  “That’s before my time. I didn’t start there until a year ago.”

  “This patient had multiple disabilities, needed chronic care. She could very well have been there a year ago.”

  “Name?”

  “Shirlee Ransom, two e’s in Shirlee.”

  “Sorry, doesn’t ring a bell—not that that means much. I wasn’t doing any casework, just paper shuffling. What ward was she in?”

  “One of the private rooms—back of the building.”

  “Then I certainly can’t help you, Doctor. I worked only with the Medi-Cal cases, trying to get the billing system in shape.”

  I thought for a moment. “She had an attendant, a man named Elmo. Black, muscular.”

  “Elmo Castelmaine.”

  “You know him?”

  “After Resthaven closed he came to work for me at Adventist. A very fine man. Unfortunately we had budgetary problems and had to let him go—he didn’t have enough formal education to satisfy Personnel.”

  “Do you have any idea where he’s working now?”

  “After the layoff he got a job at an old-age home in the Fairfax area. I have no idea if he’s still there.”

  “Do you recall the name of that place?”

  “No, but hold on. He’s in my Rolodex. He was such a nice man, I’d planned to keep in touch with him in case something came up. Ah, here it is: Elmo Castelmaine, King Solomon Gardens, Edinburgh Street.”

  I copied down the address and number and said, “Mrs. Melamed, when did Resthaven close?”

  “Six months ago.”

  “What kind of a place was it?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Who ran it?”

  “A corporation. National outfit called ChroniCare—they owned a string of similar places all over the West Coast. Fancy-looking operation, but they never got their act together running Resthaven.”

  “Clinically?”

  “Administratively. Clinically they were adequate. Not the best, but far from the worst. Business-wise, the place was a disaster. Their billing system was a complete mess. They hired incompetent clerical help, never even came close to recovering most of the money the state owed them. I was brought in to straighten it out, but it was an impossible assignment. There was no one to talk to—the home office was out in El Segundo; nobody ever returned calls. It was as if they really didn’t care about turning a profit.”

  “After it closed, where did the patients go?”

  “Other hospitals, I suppose. I quit before that.”

  “El Segundo,” I said. “Do you know if they were owned by a larger corporation?”

  �
�Wouldn’t surprise me,” she said. “Nowadays everything is.”

  I thanked her, called my broker, Lou Cestare, in Oregon, and confirmed that ChroniCare was a subsidiary of the Magna Corporation.

  “But forget about buying in, Alex. They never went public. Magna never does.”

  We chatted a while; then I signed off and phoned King Solomon Gardens. The receptionist confirmed that Elmo Castelmaine still worked there. But he was busy with a patient, couldn’t come to the phone right then. I left a message for him to call me regarding Shirlee Ransom and set out for campus.

  I got to Milton Frazier’s office by two. The Office Hours card on the door was blank. A knock produced no response, but the door was unlocked. I opened it to find the Ratman, wearing a stiff tweed suit and rimless half-glasses, hunched over his desk, using a yellow felt-tip pen to underline sections of a manuscript. The window shades were partially drawn, giving the room a sallow cast. Frazier’s beard was disheveled, as if he’d been picking at it.

  My “Hello, Professor” produced a scowl and a wave of his hand that could have meant anything from Come In to Get the Hell Out of Here.

  A stiff-backed chair faced the desk. I sat down and waited as Frazier continued to underline, using graceless slashing movements. The desk was stacked high with more manuscripts. I leaned forward and read the title of the one on top. A textbook chapter.

  He edited; I bided my time. The office had beige walls, a dozen or so diplomas and certificates, double-stacked metal bookshelves over cracked vinyl flooring. No custom interior design for this department head. Lined up on one of the shelves was a collection of glass beakers—animal brains floating in formaldehyde. The place smelled of old paper and wet rodent.

  I waited for a long time. Frazier finished with one manuscript, lifted another from the stack, and began working on it. He made more yellow marks, shook his head, twisted his beard hairs, showed no intention of stopping.

  “Alex Delaware,” I said. “Class of ’74.”

  He sat up sharply, stared at me, straightened his lapels. His shirt bagged; his tie was a hand-painted horror just ancient enough to have come back into fashion.

  He studied me. “Hmm. Delaware. Can’t say that I remember.”