He shambled inside, and Sara slammed the front door, which always swelled whenever the air got wet and refused to fit the jamb without a fight. “I guess that verifies your identity,” she said, smiling at the joke.
“Oh. Yeah.” There was a weary, hangdog expression on his face, but it was comic. “Allow me to introduce myself. Burton Kroeger, or ‘Burt’ as in ‘just call me Burt, huh?’ I’m glad to meet you at last, Sara. You’re proof that Lucas hasn’t totally lost his mind, you should pardon the obvious cheap joke.”
They shook hands, and she took his coat. “Come on into the living room, Burt, so I can get a good look at you. Coffee, tea, something stronger?”
“Got any good bourbon? Could you put a slug of it in some coffee, not too hot, okay?” He stared gratefully at the gently crackling fire and rubbed his hands. His face was already reddening in the heat of the room.
“Sure thing.”
Burt assayed Sara’s living room. Near the doorways were framed art noveau prints from the commercial work of Alphonse Mucha. Over the fireplace was a large reproduction of “Girl’s Portrait,” from the Takamatsuzuka Old Tomb in Asuka-Mura, Japan, all sandy greens, oranges, and yellows. Varnished bookshelves supported rows of hardcovers. There were no textbooks in the living room, he noticed. The furnishings and drapes were comfortable and warm. A hanging lamp of stained glass threw interesting, watery colors around, and why the hell had he driven nearly two hours through a bitch whip of a thunderstorm to see Lucas’ psychiatrist in the middle of the night, just on her say-so? You’re getting a little crazy yourself, in your old age, he thought.
But the answer was easy. Sara had said it was an emergency. A bit melodramatic, perhaps, but he had no reason to cite degree to her. She had told him there were things about Lucas she needed to know, and he had come prepared to answer questions. His own apprehension about Lucas’ stay at Olive Grove was weighed down with unanswered questions, queries he’d dared not put to Lucas during their civil afternoon together, the backslapping reacquaintance of old war buddies. Burt had come out into the night to put his misgivings about Lucas into a proper grave. Ever since Lucas’ collect call from El Granada, something had begun to stink of decay. If he could barter what information he held in exchange for some straight illuminations from Sara, it would be worth the cold and the drive and Diana’s loving gibes. He absorbed warmth from the fireplace and tried not to feel too silly.
“Here. This’ll put hair on your hands.” Sara handed over a steaming mug. “I hope Jack Daniel’s is okay.”
He smiled. “What a relief.”
She motioned him to a chair across from hers, but he preferred to hang out by the fire. She sat in her work recliner, tucking her bare feet beneath her on the cushion. The light stubble on her calves rasped gently together. She had spent Burt’s drive time trying to magic up some way to open up the not-too-pleasant topics she needed to deal with tonight. Her sense of the dramatic —or melodramatic—had not served her too well as she waited for him. She resisted the urge toward meteorological chat.
“Burt. How much do you know about Lucas’s relationship to Cory, and to Kristen?”
He parked his chin in his hand, looking almost stern. He was really thinking about the question. He was not going to obfuscate, she thought, and he has his own reasons. Firelight shone through his thin but fluffy hair. Sara could see the outline of his cranium, as though through excelsior.
“After I met Cory, I saw her exactly twice, both times over a year before their divorce. Lucas was never fond of dinner foursomes, you know—two hubbys, two wifeys. Too much like a bad postcard of upwardly mobile Americana. He disliked that.” Burt took a long sip and nodded to himself. “Cory made me… uncomfortable. Like I wanted to run from the room she was in. She was razor sharp, even caustic, and brutally polite to strangers, which I was, to her. She had a very superior attitude and enjoyed making people squirm. I think there was something in that intensity that attracted Lucas. We never talked about her, and I didn’t like to ask how she was doing. She had one trait I know well: super-perfectionism. That’s probably what drove her to kill herself. She could never live up to her own idealization of herself. Lucas did mention when she was pregnant with Kristen she refused to leave their house. She didn’t want to be seen. She had Kristen at home, in fact. From what I understand, Cory never changed a single diaper. Baby care was something to be delegated. And you know what I’m thinking, just now? That maybe Cory knew she was on the way out, and had Kristen only so she could leave a piece of herself behind in the world.”
Sara doodled on her legal pad while Burt talked.
“Don’t ask me why their marriage lasted as long as it did, Sara, because I haven’t a clue to that one. There’ve been wars much stupider that lasted much longer. I do know that Lucas was totally devoted to Kristen. As soon as Cory recovered from giving birth, she had an affair with a Porsche dealer from Westwood. Don’t tell me—I know it sounds like a bad college joke. But that’s when Cory probably entered her real drill-sergeant bitch phase.” His hands worked in the air, futilely, as though wrestling with an invisible snake.
“What do you think about the idea that Lucas may have helped Cory in some way to kill herself?” She had to tread cautiously here. She was accusing Lucas of complicity, opining murderous things about a man she was coming to love.
“That wind blew past me. I heard it and ignored it. Pardon my Sanskrit, but that’s bullshit in a bowl, if you ask me.” Burt, at least, was convinced of his friend’s innocence on that score. “Besides, it’s academic now. I think Cory was perfectly capable of setting up a rumor mechanism before offing herself. It’s the sort of nasty, vindictive shit she was a pro at. I’m positive Lucas had nothing to do with her suicide. Positive.” Repeating the word made him sound unsure.
“Why, Burt?” She wanted to keep him on that topic without getting stuck in the quicksand of asking whether he was in a position to know the truth. “I’m not trying to antagonize you. But if you know something concrete, let’s hear it.” Sara the Analyst had shifted smoothly into gear. She felt a little ashamed; Burt seemed like a good man, and now she was demanding he prove it.
“That’s all I know. Sorry. Lucas just… wouldn’t.”
Lucas had frequently mentioned Burt’s fierce loyalty, and Sara wondered if that was what she was seeing now. As if it helped, he added, “Lucas just isn’t a wasteful man, and suicide is wasteful.”
“Okay. What did you know about Lucas when he joined your firm?” This was an easier question. He’d be happy to recite history for her instead of addressing the ugly problems of here and now. He would have to sift a lot of data in his head, and this would give her time to assess what she heard.
“Lucas showed me his portfolio. I hired him. It was a damned good portfolio. He’d been savvy enough to feel out Kroeger Concepts in advance, checking up on what our current projects were, so he could walk into the office with samples targeted directly toward our needs. Like the best people in PR, he knew his first sale was to sell himself. You might say we fell for his campaign.”
Target and campaign were military words, fight-towin’ terminology. Words that were part of one of Lucas’s most successful personality facets.
“What about after Cory died?”
“I remember asking him about a million times who he was going out with,” said Burt. “He finally chucked me on the arm and said, ‘Don’t worry, big brother, I’m getting laid regularly, if that’s what’s bothering you.’ But I never saw the women he dated. He seemed happy. Cory was gone, and I thought that was a good thing, and I didn’t want to push it. He had loved her, after all. .. Something dawned in his eyes. He looked around to nail Sara. “Now you’re going to ask what effect Kristen’s death had. Cory’s death was a good thing; Kristen’s was a bad thing, but he loved them both. How did he compensate—is that what you’re going to ask? He found a substitute for Cory all right, but what about replacing Kristen?”
“Burt, that’s one of the reasons
I’m worried about Lucas running to earth somewhere up north. Finding psychological replacements isn’t the greatest thing that could happen in Lucas’ life right now. It’d be moving backward.”
“Back toward Cory.” His eyes told Sara a story about how nasty that might be.
She swallowed a blockage in her throat. This was getting rougher than she’d anticipated. “When Lucas first came to Olive Grove, we did a PETT scan of his brain.”
“Is that anything like a CAT scan?”
She nodded. “It’s shortform for—hold your breath —’Positron Emission Transaxial Tomography.’ Know what a tomogram is?”
He gave back a sly smile. “Yeah. It’s a roentgenogram.” He paused a beat. A good punchline could give them both a small relief. “Sorry. A tomogram, as far as I know, is a little picture like an X-ray of a Hostess Twinkie that shows you the cream filling without the shadow distortions of the surrounding junkfood, yes?”
“A picture of the brain without the skull in the way.”
“Gotcha.” Burt’s father had died of brain cancer. A lot of tomograms had been done. Whole stacks, before his corpse had been wheeled away on a gurney. They were rather expensive to do, and his father had not benefited.
“Lucas’ PETT scan gave us a pattern that was markedly schizophrenic. It’s a very distinctive pattern. The frontal lobes don’t take up as much of the 2deoxyglucose, the radioactive tracer, as they should.”
“Schizophrenic? You telling me he had an alter ego, a Good Lucas and a Bad Lucas that killed Cory, or something?” Burt was gearing up to forcefully express disbelief, if that was in fact what she was proposing.
She cut him off before he could work up a mad. “No, no. Schizophrenia isn’t the same thing as multiple personality. That’s a popular delusion—”
He overrode her in return because he saw what she was doing. “You mean like the delusion that says if a car falls off a cliff, it’ll explode instantaneously when it hits.”
“Right. Another delusion fostered by television, I guess. Schizophrenia, the word, means split mind. The disorder is more a matter of a breakdown in the unity of the brain, as though one part takes over and begins to dominate all the other parts. A lot of scientists have spent a wad of government money arguing over what causes it. But the PETT scan gives us the kind of symptomatology we can treat. Treatment is still as hit or miss as it ever was. We put Lucas on perpenazine, and his tomograms gradually became normal.”
“Meaning…” Burt paused to keep on track. “Meaning his brain absorbed the right amount of the tracer.”
“It absorbed it at the rate a normal brain would. So we had a brain that was possibly schizophrenic, we treated the symptoms, and it became normal. After that, there were two aspects of Lucas’ personality to deal with. The first was Lucas the unintentional widower and grieving father, the man who might have been upset enough to kill himself. The second was Lucas the problem solver, the man who engineers manipulative PR campaigns, and who plotted that brilliant stunt against Gabriel Stannard— Whip Hand’s lead singer —on the steps of the Beverly Hills Courthouse.” She picked up her legal pad. Under Burt’s increasingly incredulous gaze, she laid out the sequence of events and the chain of theorizing involving the ex-members of Whip Hand, the “rock sanctions,” and Lucas’ possible vengeance motive.
She hated it as she read it off. It looked more convincing on the ruled yellow paper than it sounded coming out of her mouth. She rose to freshen Burt’s drink and find the first of many filtered Salem l00s for a long night.
Burt shook his head a long time. “You just said he was normal. Cured.”
“I know.” She kept her eyes on her bare feet, on the polished stretches of hardwood floor separating the throw rugs, as she marshaled courage. “But bear with me for a second. I’m going to suggest something pretty wild, and I’m not sure it’ll stand up to a lot of punching around just yet.”
Burt folded his arms. Defensive body language was a bad sign. He watched his drink steam, unsipped.
“What could make Lucas kill someone?” she said. “There was no one to blame for Cory, but what about Kristen? What if he’d used a real gun on the courthouse steps? I’m sure he must have weighed the pros and cons of killing that rock singer. Instead, he pulled off something almost elegant. You know the guy sustained a head wound. He bled even though Lucas never touched him.”
“He was marked.…”
“Something like that. But that brought me to another area, a touchy but relevant one. You see, Burt, I’ve always been interested in humankind’s capacity to kill. What, exactly, forms it? You were in the military; so was Lucas. You know the ways in which circumstances can get screwed up, or become irrelevant. How killing is made necessary. The ways people justify it to themselves when the reasons aren’t as clear-cut. Moral distinctions fly right out the porthole.” She pulled a deep and deadly puff of her cigarette. “We’re all latent killers. The question is, what makes a killer evil?”
Burt sped ahead. “I thought to myself once… that if Lucas had been involved in Cory’s suicide, it didn’t matter. Maybe she deserved it, for all the pain she whipped on him. I’m not contradicting myself, I’m really not. It didn’t occur to me in any practical sense. More theoretically.”
“That’s part of my point: you thought of it.” Puff. “At some point, we all think, that person should die. Not as a matter of corrupt morals, simply as an expedient. So let’s say Lucas was innocent in the matter of Cory’s death. But let’s also say he had a mental problem. Let’s say he was clay, waiting to be shaped by a catastrophe. Cory dies. Kristen dies. Catastrophes.” With a weird detachment, Sara watched her body curl up in her chair, as though trying to contract, defensively, fearing an attack on her fragile guesswork. The cigarette was already sucked down to a glowing nub between her fingers. Acid churned in her stomach. The slight odor of the dead tea lees was making her stomach bubble. She butted out her smoke and lit another. “Did you know the chemical imbalances in the brains of schizophrenics have led some researchers to believe that schizophrenics are in the process of actually altering their physical structure? And all we know is that we can treat an aberrant PETT scan until the tomogram changes, becomes what we call ‘normal.’ When it does that, the schizophrenic tendencies conveniently recede.”
“You said you’d cured him, Sara.” Not that he needed to remind her.
Her voice became very soft. “Language is funny, Burt. It can mean contrary things. You know what I’ve begun to think? That technical expertise makes us arrogant. We treated a PETT scan instead of the patient, and put all our faith in a chemical, technical solution. The tomogram is what we cured. I’m not so sure about our friend Lucas.”
“But you said the tomogram’s configuration became normal. You treated symptoms and effected a change.” He prompted her to continue. He was intrigued, if resentful. His gaze finally left the woman in “Girl’s Portrait” and met Sara’s.
This is it, she thought. The shit-or-git crunch point, the place where she laid down her professional reputation as a wager. “What if. What if by using chemicals to force Lucas’ brain to become normal, we made it into a new configuration? Suppose the schizophrenic pattern wasn’t an aberration. Suppose Lucas was abnormal all along, and normal, for him, is a guy who ruthlessly murders rock musicians. Because the consciousness of this new brain draws a vengeance motive from Lucas the grieving father, and the moral right to kill from Lucas the plan man.”
Burt suddenly looked very tired, like a man waiting for a phone to ring, knowing bad news is on the way. Carefully, he said, “Lucas loved Kristen. Maybe he didn’t love Cory so much; maybe he had brutal thoughts toward her. But I don’t think his mind, his intellect, could countenance such an insane revenge fantasy based on Kristen’s death alone. Because he knew her death was an accident. Regardless of all the smoke, it really was accidental. And he realized how much that upset him—” Burt cut himself off, as if he smelled impending doom. “And that’s what brought him to yo
u.”
“I’m suggesting that to search for a single cause, a key event to blame, is fruitless. There is only a sequence of events—what came first hardly matters. Three things are important. Kristen died. That was fate, bad timing, a genuine tragedy. We treated Lucas…and perhaps made the mistake of believing that all solutions are chemical. And then there was a flaw in our raw material we didn’t know about. Like the tainted ingredients that turn Jekyll into Hyde, and doom him because no other batch of chemicals is tainted in quite the same way. By treating Lucas, we force his new mind into being—the mind that looks so deceptively normal on the PETT scans. Three things—the gun, the bullet, the trigger finger.” She made a mock pistol with her thumb and forefinger. “Bang.” Saying it scared her.
“You’re saying that we’re all killers,” said Burt sourly, “waiting for the right combination of chemicals and circumstances. The correct input to make us run amok.”
“Not everybody—just Lucas. His brain was different in a special way none of us could understand.”
“It wasn’t circumstances or tragedies. It was him.” With a tang of justified sarcasm, he added, “Well, thank God he’s normal now, if you’re right.”
“Oh, Burt, can’t you tell how much this hurts me?” She damned her eyes a thousand times for tearing up. “This stings the hell out of me. I care about him. I’d never seen anyone as alone as he was when he came to Olive Grove. He needed someone who cared so badly—”
“Unless he was just playacting for you, stringing you along the whole time.” His voice did not waver. “What if the whole gig at the hospital was a sham, to give himself an alibi? He’s cured, there are papers to prove it, so no one could say he’s the one out there killing.” It was an insult to Burt to think he could not have known so much about his friend. Part of his rising anger was an attempt to wound Sara for giving him a convincing story that he wanted not to believe. “Suppose he was just leading you down the garden path? And to make sure you don’t get in too deep and find out what he’s really up to, he makes you fall in love with him. If you’re a professional, how could you fall for a ploy like that? Part of Lucas’ goddamn job is turning charm on and off like a light switch. And you knew that. Haven’t you ever heard of counter-transference, Sara? That’s classified as dangerous malpractice—a doctor falling in love with a patient. And from the way Lucas talked about it, it’s love. Believe it.”
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