Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 03 - Over the Edge

by Over the Edge

  He looked me over, squinting through the smoke.

  'Friend of Billy's huh?'

  'More of an acquaintance. My fiancee builds his guitars.'

  'Oh, yeah,' he rumbled, 'spaceships, Popsicles, and six-string dildos, right?'

  'I haven't seen any dildos yet.' I grinned.

  'You will, man. That's the way it's going. Away from substance, zoom into style. Strum a dildo, break platinum. Billy's a stone businessman, he knows where it's at.'

  He nodded his head in self-agreement.

  'Fact is, even the style today has no style. Two chords on a synthesiser and a lot of filthy words. Not that I mind filth -I played my share of raunchy gigs - but to be meaningful, filth's got to go somewhere, you know? Carry the story. It ain't good enough to shock grandma.'

  He massaged his belly and took another hit of cloves.

  'Anyway, no matter about all of that. Billy's all right; the boy can get down when he wants to.' He coughed. 'So your lady builds those toys, huh? Must be an interesting lady.'

  'She is.'

  'Maybe I should get me one of those things in a four-string model.'

  He pantomimed holding a bass and moved his fingers down an imaginary fretboard.

  'Boom da boom, chukka boom, chukka boom. Big old furry dildo with a heavy bottom sound. What do you think?'

  'It's got possibilities.'

  'Sure. Shoulda had one of those at the Cow Palace in 'sixty-eight.' He started humming in an incongruous falsetto. 'Boom boom da boom. Here I am, mama, signed, sealed, delivered, and ha-ard. Can't you just see the little girl boppers squirm?'

  He finished the cigarette and put it out in a ceramic ashtray.

  'Shrink, huh?'

  'That's right.'

  'Know Tim Leary?'

  'I met him once at a convention. Years ago, when I was a student.'

  'Whaddya think?'

  'Interesting fellow.'

  'Man's a genius. Fucking pioneer of the consciousness.'

  He looked to me for confirmation. I smiled noncommittally. He recrossed his legs and folded his arms across his chest.

  'So, Alexander the Grateful, what is it you want to know?'

  'Billy said you knew everyone on the Haight.'

  'An exaggeration' - he beamed - 'but not a humungous one. It was a tight scene, one big family, fluid boundaries. Roily got tapped as one of the daddies.'

  'I'm trying to find out anything I can about two people

  who lived on the Haight back in 'sixty-six. Peter Cadmus and Margaret Norton. She also went by the name of Margo Sunshine.'

  I'd hoped the names would trigger a casual memory, but his smile died and his colour deepened.

  'You're talking about dead people, man.'

  'You knew them personally?'

  'What's the connection, man?'

  I explained my involvement with Jamey, leaving out the fact that I'd been fired.

  'Yeah. I should have known. Read about the kid in the papers. Very ugly shit. What do you want? To find out if his parents dropped acid, so you can blame it on twisted chromosomes, right? More witch hunts and reefer madness. Yo, Joe McCarthy.'

  'I'm not interested in that. All I want to find out is what they were like - as human beings - so I can understand him better.'

  'What they were like? They were beautiful. Part of a beautiful time.'

  He picked up a pack of clove cigarettes, stared at it, tossed it aside, and pulled a joint out of his stash bag. Lovingly and slowly he lit it, closed his eyes, sucked in a cloud of marijuana, and smiled.

  'Dead people,' he said after a while. 'Hearing their name's pulling up heavy-duty associations. Beaming flashbacks on the old cerebrovideo.' He shook his head. 'Don't know if I want to get into that.'

  'Were you close to them?'

  He looked at me as if I were retarded.

  'There was no close and far. Everyone was everyone. One big collective consciousness. A la Jung. Peaceful. Beautiful. No one ripped anyone off because it woulda been like tearing off a hunk of your own skin.'

  During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college I'd got a job in San Francisco, playing guitars in a dance band at the Mark Hopkins. Flower power had been in its heyday, and I'd paid several visits to the pharmacologic bazaar the hippies had carved

  out of the Haight-Ashbury ghetto. The streets of the Haight were a crazy quilt of social outcasts living on the edge: baby-faced bikers, whores, pimps, and other assorted jackals. A broth seasoned with unstable ingredients that boiled over frequently into violence, the talk of peace and love a dope-inspired illusion.

  But I left Oberheim his memories unchallenged and asked him the name of the group Peter and Margo had lived with.

  'They used to crash with a tribe called the Swine Club. Beautiful bunch of heads, lived in an old place right off Ashbury and ran free concerts in the park. They'd get veggies from dumpsters, cook up these big batches of rice, and give it away free, man. To anyone. Big parties. Be-ins. Nirvana gigged there all the time. So did Big Brother and Quicksilver and the Dead. Righteous all-day jams that made the place rock. The whole world was there. Even the Angels were cool. People would get up and rip off their clothes and dance. Little Margo was the wildest. She had a snake body, you know.'

  He inhaled, and a quarter of the joint glowed. When he finally exhaled, nothing came out but a paroxysm of dry coughing. After it stopped, he licked his moustache and smiled.

  'What kind of guy was Peter?' I asked.

  'Stone-beautiful. We used to call him Peter the Cad. 'Cause he was a righteous badass - an Errol Flynn, a fucking musketeer, you know? Dark and wild and beautifully dangerous. Ready for anything, man. Heavily into risk taking.'

  'What kinds of risks did he take?'

  He waved his hand impatiently.

  'Head games. Sticking one foot off the cliff and dangling, exploring the outer limits of the sensorium. A psychic pioneer. Like Dr. Tim.'

  He reflected on that and toked on the joint.

  'Was Margo into games, too?'

  He smiled blissfully.

  'Margo was soft. Beautiful. Heavily into giving and

  sharing. She could boogie all night to just a drum and a tambura. Like a Gypsy lady, mystical and magical.'

  He went through two more king-sized joints before showing signs of intoxication, talking incessantly as he tooted. But it was dope talk, loosely associated and disjointed. About concerts that had taken place two decades ago, the scarcity of high-quality dope because the 'mind police' had poisoned the fields with paraquat, a scheme to reassemble the original members of Big Blue Nirvana in order to plan a comback ('Except Dawg, man. He's a fucking lawyer with MGM. Stay away from that noise'). Cannabis dreams that told me nothing.

  I sat patiently, trying to pry loose morsels of information about Peter and Margo, but he just repeated that they were beautiful, then veered off into more self-satisfying meanderings about the good old days, followed by indignant diatribes about the heartlessness of the contemporary music scene.

  'A hundred fucking dollars to see Duran Duran in a society where heavy blues men with righteous chops eat out of garbage cans. Fucked up.'

  The third joint was out. He opened his mouth and swallowed the roach.

  'Roily, do you remember anything about Peter's father visiting him?'

  'Nope.'

  'How about Margo's pregnancy? Any memories of that?'

  'Just that she was sick, man. She'd try to get up and dance, but after a couple of seconds she'd turn all greenish pale and start to heave. Bummer.'

  'How did she and Peter feel about the pregnancy?'

  'Feel?' he was starting to mumble, and his head drooped drowsily.

  'Emotionally. Were they happy about it?'

  'Sure.' His eyelids fluttered shut. 'It was a happy time. Except for the war and the shit El BJ kept trying to pull, everything was a fucking giggle.'

  Suppressing a sigh, I played a long shot.

  'You said the Angels hung aroun
d the concerts given by the Swine Club.'

  'Yeah. They were cool. This was before Jagger pulled that Altamont shit.'

  'Did Peter or Margo have any special relationship with the Angels or any other bikers?'

  He yawned and shook his head. 'No relationship was special. Everyone was loving. Equal.'

  'Did they hang out with bikers?'

  'Unh-unh.'

  He was drifting off to sleep, and there was one question I had to ask. One that I'd been sitting on for the last hour.

  'Roily, you've described Peter as someone with a real lust for life - '

  'He lived to live, man.'

  'All right. But a few years later he ended up committing suicide. What could have led to that?'

  That woke him up. He opened his eyes and glared at me angrily.

  'Suicide is bullshit, man.' His head bobbed like that of a toy dog on the rear deck of a low rider.

  'What do you mean?'

  'It doesn't happen,' he said, whispering conspiratorially. 'A fucking figment. The establishment uses it as a label to make rockers and head saints look like cop-outs. Janis, Jimi, Morrison, the Bear. Janis didn't off herself; she died from the pain of being. Jimi didn't off himself; the government shot him up with some kind of napalm because he knew too much truth and they wanted to shut his mouth. Morrison and the Bear aren't even dead. For all I know, Buddy Holly's with 'em. They're probably partying somewhere in the Greek isles. Suicide is bullshit, man. It doesn't happen.'

  'Peter-'

  'Peter didn't off himself, man. He died in a head game. Like I told you.'

  'What kind of head game?'

  'An ecstasy trip. Exploring the boundaries.'

  'Tell me more about it.'

  'Sure.' He shrugged. 'Why not? He used to play it all the time. Get naked, climb up on a chair, make this noose out of a silk rope, and put it around his neck. Bring his weight down on it so it was tight and stroke his cock till he came. He was something to see, moaning, like Jesus in ecstasy.' He ran a stubby tongue over his lips and imitated a street-black patois: 'He used to say the pressure heightened the pleasure.'

  He was mumbling, nearly incoherent, but I was listening acutely. He was describing a phenomenon known as eroticised hanging or autoerotic asphyxia, one of the more arcane sexual kinks, custom-designed for those who consider flirtation with death an enhancement to orgasm.

  Eroticised hangers masturbate while a rope or other binding constricts their carotids, gradually increasing the pressure so that at the point of climax, the arteries are shut down completely. Some use complex systems of pulleys to hoist themselves to the noose. Others fold into bizarre contortions. Any way it's done, it's a quirky game and a dangerous one: If the masturbator loses consciousness before removing the rope or positions himself in such a way that liberation is prevented or unduly delayed, death by asphyxiation is inevitable.

  'A game, you dig?' Oberheim smiled. 'He liked to play games. And one day he lost. But that's cool.'

  I LEFT him snoring in his office, a flaccid monument to self-absorption: The interview had been foggy and off kilter, but I'd picked up another tidbit of Cadmus's psycho-pathology: Peter had been an eroticised hanger, his death very possibly a kinky accident. I wondered if Souza had known about the hanging game all along and decided that he probably hadn't; in his hands, the knowledge would have been used strategically, as evidence that sexual perversion, as well as mental disturbance, ran in the family.

  As I drove north on La Brea, I thought of how downbeat I'd been with Robin and realised that Oberheim wasn't the only one with a self-absorption problem. I'd been so wrapped up in the case and the guilt it had unearthed that I'd neglected her, using her as a sounding board without considering that she might need some attention herself.

  Determined to make amends, I made a three-point turn at a gas station on Fountain, drove south to Wilshire, and headed west, into Beverly Hills. There was about an hour left before the shops closed, and after parking in a city lot on Beverly Drive, I spent it like a gameshow winner on a spree, buying an antique lace blouse at a boutique on Canon, perfume and bath soap at Giorgio, a quart of Friisen Gladje raspberry chocolate ice cream, an enormous gourmet basket at Jurgensens, the copper skillet she'd wanted at Davis-Sonoma, a dozen coral roses arranged with leather fern and baby's breath. It was no solution, just a start in the right direction.

  Manoeuvering through a sea of Mercedes, I drove away from the high-rent district and made one more stop - at a fish market near Overland - before heading home. When I got there, at six-thirty, Robin's truck was nowhere in sight, and she'd left word with the service that she'd be home by seven forty-five.

  'There's another one, too, Doctor?' said the service operator. 'Do you want it?'

  'Sure.'

  'A Jennifer Leavitt called at three. She left two numbers.'

  I copied them on a scrap of paper. One was a university extension; the other, a Fairfax District exchange. I was curious about what Jennifer wanted but not curious enough to interrupt my plans. Making a mental note to call her later that evening, I placed the scrap in my pocket.

  Carrying the gifts into the bedroom, I arranged them on the bed. After changing into jeans and a well-worn corduroy shirt, I went into the kitchen, put Joe Pass on the stereo, an apron around my waist, and set about preparing dinner: an appetiser of jumbo mushrooms stuffed with garlic and breadcrumbs; a salad of butter lettuce, pepper, and Chinese scallions; a carafe of tarragon vinaigrette; grilled fillets of Norwegian salmon topped with capers; fresh string beans lightly buttered; and a bottle of sauvignon blanc - a virgin white from the vineyard of a lady judge I'd once met. The Friisen Gladje would serve as dessert.

  She walked through the door just as I was dressing the salad. I took her coat and portfolio, led her to the kitchen,

  sat her at the table, and brought a basin and cup with which to wash her hands.

  'Whew!' She grinned broadly. 'To what do I owe all this?'

  Shushing her with a kiss, I uncorked and poured the wine and brought the mushrooms to the table, along with a log of sourdough.

  'Alex, this is terrific!'

  'Wolfgang Puck, eat your heart out.'

  We ate slowly and tranquilly, with a minimum of conversation.

  'Delicious,' she said, pushing her plate away.

  'Ready for dessert?'

  She groaned and patted her tummy.

  'Can we wait awhile?'

  'Sure. Go relax while I clean up.'

  'Let me help you,' she said, standing. 'I need to move around.'

  'All right, but first go in the bedroom and bring me a cooler shirt.'

  'Sure, hon.'

  She came back holding the lace blouse to her breast, smiling like a kid.

  'Baby,' she said.

  We moved toward each other, embraced, and never separated for the rest of the evening.

  The next morning, after she'd gone to the shop, I hung up my jeans and the scrap with Jennifer's numbers fell out. After picking up the phone, I dialled the university extension. A slow-talking baritone informed me that I'd reached the psychobiology lab. In the background was a wash of voices.

  'This is Dr. Delaware returning Jennifer Leavitt's call.'

  'Who?'

  'Dr. Delaware.'

  'No, who're you calling?'

  'Jennifer Leavitt.' I spelled it.

  'Oh. Uh, one second.' He put down the phone and

  shouted out her name, returned to the line even more lethargic than before. 'Uh, no, she's not here.'

  'When do you expect her?'

  'Don't know. Uh, we're right in the middle of something, so why don't you, uh, call later.'

  'Can you leave a message for her?'

  'Uh, well, I really don't-'

  'Thanks.'

  I hung up and dialled the Fairfax exchange. A cheerful-sounding woman answered.