Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 03 - Over the Edge

by Over the Edge

  I looked at him with reflexive disbelief. He met my eyes and tried to remain impassive, but his face sagged.

  'That probably didn't come out right. I'm not trying to punt. I'm more than willing to do anything I can to help. Christ knows that's all I've been doing since I found out. Trying to help. This thing's been a nightmare. You do your best to live a certain way, to keep things organised. You think you know where you stand, and boom, everything's blown to hell overnight.'

  'I know it's tough on you - '

  'It's tougher on my wife. She really cares about him. Both of us do,' he added quickly, 'but she was the one who was home with him all the time. In fact, if you really want details, she could tell you more about him than I could.'

  'I plan on talking with her, too.'

  He played with the knot of his tie.

  'Your name's familiar,' he said, looking down again.

  'We spoke on the phone five years ago,' I said.

  'Five years ago? What was it about specifically?'

  I was certain that he remembered the conversation clearly but recounted it, nonetheless. He interrupted me midway.

  'Aha. Yes, it's coming back. You wanted me to make him see a psychiatrist. I did give it a try, talked to him about it; but he fought it tooth and nail, and I didn't want to force him. It's not my nature to force things. I'm a problem solver, not a problem creator. Forcing him to do things had created problems in the past.'

  'What kinds of problems?'

  'Conflict. Fights. Mouthing off. My wife and I have two little girls, and we don't like them exposed to that kind of thing.'

  'It must have been a tough decision to have him involuntarily committed.'

  'Tough? No. At that point there was no other way. For his sake.'

  He got up, went to the bar, and fixed himself a scotch and soda.

  'Sure I can't get you anything?'

  'Nothing, thanks.'

  He carried the drink back to the desk, sat down, and sipped. The hand that held the glass shook almost imperceptibly. He was nervous and defensive, and I knew he'd try to find another way to divert the interview. Before he could, I started talking.

  'You began taking care of Jamey after your brother died. What was he like then?'

  The question perplexed him.

  'He was a little kid.' He shrugged.

  'Some little kids are easy going; others are irritable. What kind of temperament did Jamey have?'

  'Cranky sometimes, quiet others. I guess he cried a lot -more than my girls anyway. The main thing you noticed right away was how damned smart he was. Even as a baby."

  'Did he talk early?'

  'You bet.'

  'At what age?'

  'Christ, that's a long way back.'

  'Try to remember.'

  'Let's see - it had to be under a year. Six months maybe. I remember one time I was home on semester break and Father and Peter were trying to change his diaper, and this little thing pipes up and says, "No diaper." And I mean clearly, no baby talk. It was bizarre hearing words come out of something that small. Father made some joke about "give the midget a cigar", but I could tell he was upset by it.'

  'What about Peter?'

  'It bothered him, too. What does any of this have to do with the situation at hand?'

  'I need to know as much about him as possible. In what other ways was he precocious?'

  'Everything.'

  'Can you give me some examples?'

  He frowned impatiently.

  'It's like he was moving at seventy-eight rpm when everyone else was going thirty-three and a third. By the time he was a year old he could go into a restaurant and

  order a sandwich. We had a maid who spoke Dutch. All of a sudden he was talking Dutch. Fluently, just by listening to her. He taught himself to read when he was about three. This was around the time I took him in. I walked in one evening and saw him with a book, asked him if he wanted me to read it to him. He looked up and said, "No, Uncle Dwight. I can read it myself." I thought he was faking, so I said to him, "Let me hear you." Sure enough, the kid could read. Better than some of my employees. By the age of five he could pick up the daily paper and read it front to back.'

  'Tell me about his schooling.'

  'I was tied up full-time with the company, so I sent him to nursery school. He drove the teachers crazy. Probably because he was so much smarter than they were. They expected him to do what the other kids were doing and his attitude was basically "You're stupid, screw you." After I got married, my wife worked hard at finding him the right school. She looked around for a long time - visited lots of places, interviewed teachers, the works - until she came up with the right one. It was the best kindergarten in Hancock Park, full of good kids from good solid families. He mouthed off so much they kicked him out after two months.'

  'For talking back?'

  'For bucking the system. He wanted to read adult books - I don't mean porno. Faulkner, Steinbeck. They thought it would bend the other kids out of shape and you can see their point. A school's a system. Systems are based on structure. But too much slack in a system, and things fall apart. He needed to give in, but he wouldn't.

  'When they tried to lay down the law, he gave them lip, pulled tantrums, kicked the teachers in the shins. I think he called one of them a Nazi or something. Anyway, they finally had enough and booted him out. You can imagine how my wife felt, after putting in all that work.'

  'Where'd he go to school after that?'

  'Nowhere. We kept him home until he was seven, with tutors. In one year he taught himself Latin, about five

  years' worth of math, and the entire high school English curriculum. But my wife pointed out that socially he was still a baby. So we kept trying different schools. Even one in the Valley for gifted kids. He never could adjust. He always thought he was smarter than anyone else and refused to follow rules. I don't care what your IQ is, that kind of attitude won't get you anywhere.'

  'So he never really had much conventional classroom education?'

  'Not really, no. We would have liked to see him with normal kids, but it didn't work out.'

  He tilted his head back and drained his glass.

  'It was a curse.'

  'What was?'

  'Being too damned smart for his own good.'

  I turned a page of my notepad. 'How old was he when you married?'

  'We've been married thirteen years, so he was five."

  'How did he react to the marriage?'

  'He was happy. We let him be the ring bearer at the wedding. Heather had plenty of little boy cousins who wanted to do it, but she insisted on Jamey, said he needed the special attention.'

  'And he and Heather got along well from the beginning?'

  'Sure. Why not? She's a great gal, terrific with kids. She's given him a hell of a lot more than lots of natural mothers. This thing is tearing her apart.'

  'Did caring for such a difficult child place stresses on your marriage?'

  He picked up the whisky glass and rolled it between his palms.

  'Have you ever been married?'

  'No.'

  'It's a great institution, you should try it. But it takes work to keep it going. I used to race yachts in college, and it seems to me marriage is like a big boat. Put the time into maintaining it, and it's something to see. Get lax, and it goes to hell in a handbasket.'

  'Did Jamey cause any additional maintenance problems?'

  'No,' he said. 'Heather could handle him.'

  'What kinds of things did she have to handle?'

  He drummed his fingers on the table.

  'I have to tell you, Doctor, this line of questioning is really starting to bother me.'

  'In what way?'

  'Your whole approach. Like the way you just said "In what way?'' Prefab. Scripted. I feel like I'm on the couch being analysed. I don't see what my marriage has to do with getting him into a hospital instead of a jail.'

  'You're not a patient, but you are an important source of inform
ation. And information's what I need to lay the foundation for my report. Just as you do when you build a building.'

  'Yeah, but we don't dig our foundations one inch deeper than the geologists say we have to.'

  'Unfortunately my field's not as precise as geology.'

  'That's what bothers me about it.'

  I closed my book.

  'Perhaps this isn't the right time to talk, Mr. Cadmus.'

  'There isn't going to be a better one. I just want to stay on the topic'

  He folded his arms across his chest and stared out at a point over my shoulder. Behind the glasses his eyes were flat, as unyielding as armour plate.

  'There's something you need to bear in mind,' I said evenly. 'A trial is a spectacle. The psychological equivalent of a public flogging. Once the lawyers get going, no area of Jamey's life or yours will be off-limits. Your mother's illness, the relationship between your parents, your brother's marriage and suicide, your marriage - everything will be fair game for journalists, spectators, the jury. If it's juicy enough, some author may even write a book about it. Compared to that, this interview's a piece of cake. If you can't handle it, you're in real trouble.'

  He reddened, clenched his jaw, and his mouth began to twitch. I watched his shoulders stiffen, then slump.

  Suddenly he looked helpless, a kid playing dress up in the executive suite.

  When he spoke again, his voice was choked with rage.

  'We put ourselves on the line for the little bastard. Year after year after year. And then he goes and does something like this.'

  I got up and walked to the bar. For his drink he'd used Glenlivet, which suited me just fine. After pouring a couple of fingers for myself, I fixed him another scotch and soda and brought it to him.

  Too numb to speak, he nodded thanks and took the glass. We drank in silence for several minutes.

  'All right,' he said finally. 'Let's get it over with.'

  We picked up where we'd left off. He repeated his denial that raising Jamey had affected his marriage, though he admitted the boy had never been easy to live with. The lack of conflict he credited to his wife's patience and talent with children.

  'Had she worked with kids before?' I asked.

  'No, she studied anthropology. Got a master's and started work on her doctorate. I guess she's just a natural.'

  Shifting gears. I had him trace the development of Jamey's psychosis. His account was similar to the one Sarita Flowers had given me: a gradual but steady descent into madness that escaped notice longer than it should have because the boy had always been different.

  'When did you start to get really worried?'

  'When he started to get really paranoid. We were afraid he'd do something to Jennifer and Nicole.'

  'Had he ever threatened them or got physical?'

  'No, but he began to get mean. Critical and sarcastic. Sometimes he called them little witches. It didn't happen often because he'd been living in our guesthouse over the garage since the age of sixteen and we hardly saw him, but it concerned us."

  'Before that he was living in your house?'

  'That's right. He had his own room with a private bath.'

  'Why did he move to the guesthouse?'

  "He said he wanted privacy. We talked it over and said fine; he'd always kept to his room anyway, so it wasn't as if this were a major change.'

  'But he continued to come into the main house and harass your children?'

  'Once in a while, maybe four or five times a month, mostly to eat. The guesthouse has a kitchen, but I never saw him cook. He'd forage in our refrigerator, take out bowls of leftovers, and eat standing up at the sink, bolting it down like an animal. Heather offered to set a nice table for him, cook him a decent meal, but he refused. Later he became a health nut and the scrounging stopped, so we saw him even less, which was a blessing, because the first thing he always did when he came in was bitch, putting everything down. At first it just seemed like snottiness; then we realised he was going off the deep end.'

  'What made you realise that?'

  'As I said before, the paranoia. He'd always been a suspicious kid, looking for ulterior motives behind everything. But this was different. The minute he'd enter the kitchen, he'd sniff at the food like a dog, start screaming that it was poisoned, that we were trying to poison him. When we'd try to calm him down, he'd call us all kinds of names. He'd get all flushed, and his eyes would get this really wild look, spaced out, nodding, as if he were in another world, listening to someone who wasn't there. Later we found out from Dr. Mainwaring that he'd been hallucinating voices, so that explained it.'

  'Can you remember any of the names he called you?'

  He gave a pained look.

  'He'd say we stank, that we were ravagers and zombies. One day he pointed his finger at Jennifer and Nicole and called them zombettes. At that point we knew we had to do something.'

  'Before he became psychotic, what kind of relationship did he have with your daughters?'

  'When they were little, pretty good actually. He was ten when Jennifer was born, twelve when Nikki came along -too old to be jealous. Heather encouraged him to participate in taking care of the babies. He fastened a mean

  diaper, was really good at making them laugh. He could be creative when he wanted to, and he used to put on puppet shows for them, invent fantasy stuff. But when he got older - fourteen or so - he lost interest. I know it bothered the girls because until then he'd given them all his attention, and now he was saying, "Go away, leave me alone" - and not saying it all that nicely. But both of them are great little. girls - very popular, plenty of other fish to fry - so I'm sure they put it out of their minds pretty fast. They avoided him without our telling them to do so. But we still worried.'

  'And that was what prompted you to have him committed.'

  'That's what started us thinking about it. The straw that broke the camel's back was when he destroyed our library.'

  'When was this?'

  He took a deep breath and let it out.

  'A little over three months ago. It was at night. We'd already gone to bed. All of a sudden we started hearing these incredible noises from downstairs; screaming; yelling; loud crashing. Heather called the police, and I grabbed my gun and went down to check it out. He was in the library, naked, hurling books off the shelves, ripping them up, shredding them, screaming like a maniac. It was something I'll never forget. I yelled for him to stop but he looked right through me, as if I were some kind of... apparition. Then he started coming at me; the gun didn't bother him a bit. His face was red and puffy, and he was breathing hard. I backed away and locked him in. He went back to destroying the place; I could hear him smashing and tearing. Some of these books were old and worth a fortune; they were left to me by my dad. But I had to let him destroy them to prevent someone from getting hurt.'

  'How long was he in there?'

  'Maybe fifteen minutes. It seemed like hours. Finally the police came and restrained him. It was tough because he fought them. They thought he was on PCP or something and called for an ambulance. They were ready to take him to County General Hospital, but we'd talked to Mainwaring the week before, and we said we wanted him

  to go to Canyon Oaks. There was a bit of hassle, but then Horace showed up - Heather had called him, too - and smoothed things out.'

  'Who referred you to Dr. Mainwaring?'

  'Horace. He'd worked with him in the past and said he was topnotch. We called him, woke him up, and he said to come right over. An hour later Jamey was committed to Canyon Oaks.'

  'On a seventy-two-hour hold?'

  'Yes, but Mainwaring let us know right away he'd be staying there for a while.'

  He looked at his empty glass, then longingly at the Glenlivet bottle on the bar.

  'The rest, as they say,' he said tersely, 'is goddamn history.'

  He'd been answering my questions cooperatively for more than an hour and looked worn out. I offered to quit and come back another time.

  'Hell
,' he said, 'the day's shot anyway. Keep going.

  He looked at the bar again, and I told him to feel free to mix another drink.

  'No' - he smiled - 'I don't want you thinking I'm some kind of lush and putting it in your report.'

  'Don't worry about it,' I said.

  'Nah, it's okay. I'm past my limit. Now, what do you want to know?'

  'When did you first realise he was homosexual?' I asked, bracing myself for another bout of defensiveness. To my surprise, he remained calm, almost sanguine.