Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 03 - Over the Edge

by Over the Edge

  'Darrel Gonzales? Matthew Higbie?'

  'No.'

  'Rolf Piper? John Henry Spinola? Andrew Terrance Boyle? Ray ford Bunker?'

  'None of those.'

  'How about these: Rusty Nails, Tinkerbell, Angel, Quarterflash?'

  'No.'

  'Never mentioned any of them?'

  'Not a one.'

  'You know who those people are?'

  'I assume they're victims of the Lavender Slasher.'

  'They're victims all right. Of little Jimmy Cadmus. Your former patient.'

  He'd shot questions at me that were oblique and out of context in an attempt to throw me off guard and establish psychological dominance. I was familiar with the technique, having seen it used by Milo and some of the more devious psychotherapists. But while Milo was a virtuoso who capitalised upon an uncanny ability to appear stupid and inept before moving in for the kill, Whitehead seemed genuinely inept. His tangents had led nowhere, he'd learned close to nothing, and now he was frustrated.

  'This guy you're protecting,' he said angrily, 'let me tell you what he did. First he strangled them; then he cut their throats ear to ear. The "second smile" the lab boys call it. He gave 'em all nice big smiles. After that he went to work on the eyes. Popped 'em out with his fingers and pureed 'em. Then down to the other balls.'

  He recounted the details of the killings, growing progressively angrier with each lurid disclosure, glaring at me as if I'd wielded the knife. I found the intensity of his hostility puzzling. I hadn't been able to help him because I knew next to nothing. He was convinced I was stonewalling, and I could understand his frustration. But frustration alone didn't account for the naked contempt in his eyes.

  When the recitation of horrors was over, he took Cash's notes from the smaller man's lap and read them slowly. The Beverly Hills detective looked bored and began fidgeting, a one-man band of narcissistic mannerisms -smoothing his razor-cut; scrutinising his manicure; removing his rosy glasses, holding them up to the light, spitting on them, and wiping them lovingly. Then he got up and walked around the room.

  'This is very nice,' he said, eyeing a collection of framed ivory miniatures. 'Indian?'

  'Persian.'

  'Very nice.'

  He inspected paintings, examined books on the coffee

  table, fingered upholstery fabric, and checked his reflection in a Victorian bevelled mirror.

  'Great room,' he pronounced. 'Did you use a decorator?'

  'No.'

  'Just kinda did it yourself?'

  'Over the years.'

  'Has a good feel to it,' he said. 'Coherent.' He smiled. I thought I detected a mocking edge to his words, but I couldn't be sure: the tinted lenses did a good job of masking his emotions.

  'All right, sir,' said Whitehead, 'let's go over that phone call again. From start to finish.'

  It was busywork. I considered protesting but knew it would only make things more difficult. Feeling like a kid kept after school, I complied. Whitehead removed a plum-sized lump of dead gum from his mouth, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and stowed the mess in his pocket. After filling his mouth with a fresh wad, he resumed the interrogation.

  It was a stultifying process. He repeated old questions and tossed in a batch of new ones. All ranged from pointless to irrelevant. As we trudged farther along the road to nowhere, Cash continued to check out the room, interrupting several times to comment on my good taste. Whitehead acted as if he weren't there.

  I decided this was no good cop-bad cop routine. This was no routine at all.

  They hated each other.

  By a quarter to six the interrogation was dead. At ten to, Robin came home. When I introduced her to them as my fiancée, their eyes widened in amazement.

  Suddenly I understood it all: Whitehead's antipathy and pointed comments about deviates; Cash's preoccupation with my interior decoration.

  They'd assumed I was gay.

  When you stopped to think, it make a kind of narrow-minded sense: I was friends with a homosexual cop; I'd treated - and had shown human concern for - a homosexual teenager. I had a well-decorated home. Utilising a mindless formula that approached life as simple arithmetic, they'd done their calculations and had come up with a neat little answer:

  One plus one equalled queer.

  As they fumbled and prepared to leave, I filled with anger. Not at being mistaken for a homosexual but at being categorised and dehumanised. I thought of Jamey. His whole life had been one categorisation after another. Orphan. Genius. Misfit. Pervert. Now they said he was a monster, and I didn't know enough to dispute it. But I realised, at that moment, that I couldn't walk away from learning more.

  Souza had foisted a tough choice upon me. The two policeman had helped me make my decision.

  I CALLED the attorney the next morning and, after reminding him of my terms, agreed to work with him.

  'Good, Doctor,' he said, as if I'd made the only rational decision under the circumstances. 'Just tell me what you need.'

  'First I want to see Jamey. After that I'll take a complete family history. Who'd be the best person to start with?'

  'I'm the most knowledgeable historian of the Cadmuses you could find,' he said. 'I'll give you an overview, and then you can talk with Dwight and anyone else you choose. When would you like to see the boy?'

  'As soon as possible.'

  'Fine. I'll arrange it for this morning. Have you ever visited the jail?'

  'No.'

  'Then I'll have someone meet you and orient you. Bring ID that states you're a doctor.'

  He gave me directions and offered to messenger over the ten-thousand-dollar retainer. I told him to keep the money

  until my evaluation was complete. It was a symbolic gesture, bordering on pettiness, but it made me feel less encumbered.

  The County Jail was on Bauchet Street, near Union Station, in a neighbourhood east of downtown that was half industrial, half slum. Truck yards, warehouses, and machine shops shared the area with twenty-four hour bail bondsmen, crumbling fleabags, and dusty stretches of vacant lot.

  Entry to the facility was through a subterranean parking structure. I found a space in the dimness next to a decrepit white Chrysler Imperial blotched with rust spots. Two kerchiefed and haltered young black women got out of the big car, solemn-faced.

  I followed them up a flight of iron stairs and into a small, silent courtyard created by the U-shaped intersection of the parking structure with the jail. On the left arm of the U was a door stencilled OWN RECOGNISANCE COURT. Running through the yard was a short strip of grimy sidewalk bordered by parched, yellowing lawn. A large spruce tree grew on one side of the lawn; from the other sprouted a spruce seedling - stunted, tilted, and stingily branched -that resembled nothing so much as the big tree's neglected child. The walkway ended at double doors of mirrored glass set into the high, windowless front wall of the jail.

  The building was a study in cement slab - massive, sprawling, the colour of smog. The expanse of raw, flat concrete was crosshatched overhead by concrete beams at the seam of the union with the parking garage. The junction yielded a maze of right angles as cruelly stark as monochrome Mondrian that cast cruciform shadows across the courtyard. The sold concession to ornament was the scoring of the concrete into parallel grooves, as if an enormous rake had been dragged through the cement before it had dried.

  The women reached the double doors. One of them pulled a handle and the mirror parted. They preceded me into an incongruously tiny room with glossy pale yellow walls. The floors were worn linoleum. Adorning the right

  wall was a patch of tarnished hand lockers. Blue letters over the lockers instructed anyone carrying a firearm to deposit it within.

  Straight ahead was more one-way mirror, shielding a booth similar to that of a movie house ticket taker. In the ' centre of the silvered glass was a grilled speaker. Below the speaker was a stainless steel trough. To the right of the booth was a gate of iron bars painted blue. Over the gate were painted the words
SALLY PORT. Beyond the blue bars was empty space backed by an opaque metal door.

  The women stepped up to the booth. A voice barked through the speaker. At the end of the bark was a question mark. One of the women said, 'Hawkins. Rainier P.' Another bark elicited the deposit of two driver's licences through the trough. Several moments later the bars slid open. The women trudged through, and the blue gate clanged shut behind them with earsplitting finality. They waited silently in the sally port, shifting their weight from hip to hip, looking too tired for their ages. In response to a third bark they passed their purses to the left, answered more questions, and waited some more. When the rear metal door opened suddenly, a beefy tan-uniformed sheriff's deputy stood in the opening. He nodded perfunctorily, and the women followed him through the door. When they'd disappeared, it slammed shut, loud enough to echo. The entire procedure had taken ten minutes.

  'Sir,' barked the speaker.

  I stepped up and announced myself. Up close I could make out movement on the other side of the glass, shadowy reflections of young, sharp-eyed faces.

  The speaker asked for identification, and I dropped my hospital badge from Western Paediatric into the Trough.

  A minute of scrutiny.

  'Okay, Doctor. Step into the sally port.'

  The holding area was the size of a walk-in closet. On one wall was a key-operated elevator. To the left were tinted glass sliding windows set over a steel barrier. Behind the glass sat four deputies - three moustached men, one woman. All were fair and under thirty. The men looked up

  at me briefly before resuming their examination of a copy of Hustler. The woman sat in a swivel chair and peered at a hangnail. The booth was papered with county memoranda and outfitted with a panel of electronic equipment.

  I waited restlessly, suspended between freedom and what waited on the other side of the metal door. I was no prisoner, but for the time being I was trapped, at the mercy of whoever pushed the buttons. I started to feel antsy, the anticipatory anxiety of a kid being strapped into a roller coaster seat, unsure of his fortitude and just wanting it to be over.

  When the opaque door opened, I was looking at a young Hispanic man in civilian clothes - pale blue shirt and blue-green tartan tie under a sleeveless maroon V-neck sweater, grey corduroy slacks, crepe-soled buckskin oxfords. A picture ID card clipped to the collar of the shirt said he was a social worker. He was tall, narrow, and long-limbed. Glossy brush-cut hair capped a long, pale face. Large, elfin ears created a striking resemblance to Mr. Spock that didn't dissipate when he spoke: His voice was flat, as emotionless as Morse code.

  'Dr. Delaware, I'm Patrick Montez. I'm supposed to orient you. Please come with me.'

  On the other side of the door was a wide, empty yellow corridor. As we entered it, one of the deputies in the glass booth stuck his head out and scanned the hallway in both directions. Montez took me to an elevator. We rose several flights and exited into more glossy yellow, trimmed with blue. I caught a glimpse of rumpled hospital beds through an open door at the end of the corridor.

  'My office is over there,' he said, pointing across the hall.

  A slatted wooden bench ran the length of the wall outside the office. Two men in yellow pyjamas sat slumped at opposite ends. The nearer one was a squat dark Mexican in his sixties with rummy eyes and a fallen face. The other was a young man with a full head of surfer-blond curls -tan, muscular and scarcely out of his teens. His face was male-model perfect except for the tics that caused his

  features to jump like Galvani's frog. As we passed, the wino looked away. But the blond boy turned toward us. Something feral slithered into his eyes, and his mouth twitched into a snarl.

  Suddenly he strained to rise. I looked quickly at Montez, but he seemed unperturbed. The blond boy grunted and raised his buttocks an inch from the bench before snapping back sharply, as if forced down rudely by an invisible hand. Then I saw the shackles around his wrists - metal cuffs chained to stationary bolts running through the bench seat.

  A deputy appeared, nightstick in hand. The blond boy cried out gutturally. The deputy stood watch from a distance as the prisoner slammed his back several times against the slats, then sank back down, breathing hard and mouthing silent obscenities.

  'Come on in, Doctor,' said Montez, as if nothing had happened. He took out a ring of keys, unlocked the door, and held it open.

  The interior of the office was standard county issue: desk chairs and table of grey-painted metal; a corkboard pinned with layers of official documents. The room was window-less and ventilated by a ceiling fan. A table beside the desk held a thriving potted devil's ivy and a police scanner that hissed and spat until the social worker leaned over and turned it off.

  'This is the largest jail system in the world,' he said. 'Official maximum capacity is fifty-one hundred inmates. Right now we've got seventy-three hundred. On a good weekend, when the city really gets down to partying, we process sixteen thousand.'

  He reached into a drawer and pulled out a roll of Life Savers.

  'Want one?'

  'No thanks.'

  He popped a candy into his mouth and sucked on it.

  'You're a psychologist?'

  'Right.'

  'In theory there are two parallel systems here: mental health and custody. We're supposed to work together. In

  actuality mental health is a guest. The jail is run by the sheriff's department, and the main emphasis is on processing and maintaining criminals. Psychiatric input is viewed as another tool to make that work.'

  'Makes sense,' I said.

  He nodded.

  'I start out with that spiel because I always get questions from mental health people about our treatment philosophy, modes of therapy - all that good stuff. The truth of it is this is a giant corral: We lock them up and work at keeping them alive and reasonably healthy until trial. Even if we had time for psychotherapy, I doubt it would help most of our guys. About fifteen percent are seriously psychiatrically disturbed - more impaired than the patients at County Hospital. Bona fide psychotics who're also murderers, rapists, armed robbers. If you include your everyday ambulatory sociopath - guys judged to be too dangerous to be released on bail - triple that figure. On top of that are the derelicts and gomers who do something especially outrageous and can't make ten percent of a seventy-five-dollar bail. Most of them are head cases, too.'

  'Do you medicate them?'

  'If the inmate has a private psychiatrist who's willing to administer and monitor dosages - like Cadmus - he gets medicated. Otherwise no. We're not staffed for it - one part-time psychiatrist who comes in once in a while and a handful of nurses for the entire jail. The deputies aren't qualified to handle it.'

  I considered the notion of a thousand or so mentally disturbed felons cooped up without treatment and asked how long the average stay was.

  'Usually it's days, not weeks. Again, it's a matter of processing; we have to move out as many as we move in or there'd be no place to put 'em. As is, we've got inmates sleeping on the roof in the summer and in the aisles when it cools down. Once in a while you come across someone who should have been released a month ago but wasn't because the paper work got lost and his lawyer was incompetent. Plenty of attorneys do a lot of screaming and filing of writs,

  but they don't understand the system and end up causing more trouble for their clients.'

  'Plenty but not all,' I said.

  He smiled and clicked the Life Saver against his teeth.

  'Two hours ago an order came down from on high to give you the grand tour. Now here we are. That should tell you something about Mr. Souza's influence.'

  'I appreciate your spending the time.'

  'No problem. Gives me a little respite from paper work.'

  He chewed the candy and swallowed it, took another from the roll. The ensuing silence was punctuated by a loud scream, followed by several more. Several hard thumps vibrated the wall behind us - the slatted bench being pushed repeatedly against the plaster. More screams, a
blizzard of running footsteps, the whisper of a scuffle, and all was calm. Montez had sat through it without moving a muscle.

  'Back to lockup for Mark,' he said.

  'The blond kid?'

  'Yup. Comes up for trial next week. Seemed to be calming down. You never know.'

  'What did he do?'

  'Ate a lot of PCP and tried to decapitate his girlfriend.'

  'A guy like that doesn't get locked in a cell?'

  'He came in too disturbed and too pretty to be put on cellblock, too healthy for the infirmary. We have a thirty-five-room inpatient unit - isolation rooms for prisoners too iffy for general custody - and we stuck him there, but when he started to get lucid, we moved him out to make room for someone crazier and put him on the ward. Ward patients get to move around under supervision. He started to look a little "spacey this morning, so they cuffed him. Obviously he's' slipping again - pretty typical for a duster. He belongs back in isolation, but we've got no vacancies, so he'll have to go to a cellblock with twenty-four-hour lockup. If an empty room comes up, he'll be moved back here.'