Bad Love

by Jonathan Kellerman

  His haircut was recent, the usual: clipped short at sides and back, long and shaggy on top, sideburns down to the earlobes. Country yokels had looked that way back in the fifties. Melrose Avenue hipsters were doing it nowadays. I doubted Milo was aware of either fact. The black forelock that shadowed his forehead showed a few more gray streaks. His green eyes were clear. Some of the weight he'd lost had come back; he looked to be carrying at least two hundred and forty pounds on his seventy-five inches.

  He stared at the dog and said, “What?”

  “Gee, Dad, he followed me home. Can I keep him?”

  The dog gazed up at him and yawned.

  “Yeah, I'm bored, too,” Milo told him. “What the hell is it, Alex?”

  “French bulldog,” I said. “Rare and pricey, according to a vet. And this one's a damned good specimen.”

  “Specimen.” He shook his head. “Is it civilized?”

  “Compared to what you're used to, very.”

  He frowned, patted the dog gingerly, and got slurped.

  “Charming,” he said, wiping his hand on his slacks. Then he looked at me. “Why, Marlin Perkins?”

  “I'm serious—he just showed up this morning. I'm trying to locate the owner, have an ad running in the paper. The vet said he's been well cared for. It's just a matter of time before somebody claims him.”

  “For a moment I thought this tape stuff had gotten to you and you'd gone out and bought yourself some protection.”

  “This?” I laughed, remembering Dr. Uno's amusement. “I don't think so.”

  “Hey,” he said, “sometimes bad things come in small packages—for all I know it's trained to go for the gonads.”

  The dog stood on his hind legs and touched Milo's trousers with his forepaws.

  “Down, Rover,” he said.

  “What's the matter, you don't like animals?”

  “Cooked, I do. Didja name it yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then “Rover' will have to do.” He took his jacket off and tossed it onto a chair. “Here's what I've got so far on Wallace. He keeps a low profile in slam and has some associations with the Aryan Brotherhood, but he's not a full member. As for what kind of hardware he's got in his cell, I don't know yet. Now where's the alleged tape?”

  “In the alleged tapedeck.”

  He went over and turned on the stereo. The dog stayed with me.

  I said, “You know where the meatloaf comes from, don't you?”

  He cocked his head and licked my hand.

  Then the screams came on and the hairs rose on the back of his neck.

  Hearing it the third time was worse.

  Milo's face registered revulsion, but after the sound died, he said nothing. Taking his briefcase over to the deck, he switched it off, ejected the tape, and removed it by inserting a pencil in one of the reel holes.

  “Black surface,” he muttered. “Ye olde white powder.”

  Placing the cassette atop the plastic cover of my turntable, he removed a small brush and a vial from the case. Dipping the brush into the vial, he dusted the cassette with a pale, ashlike powder, squinting as he worked.

  “Well, looks like we've got some nice ridges and swirls,” he said. “But they could all be yours. Your prints are on file with the medical board, right, so I can check?”

  “They printed me when I got my license.”

  “Meaning a week or two going through channels in order to pry it loose from Sacramento—noncriminal stuff's not on PRINTRAK yet. You haven't been arrested for anything recently, have you?”

  “Nothing I can remember.”

  “Too bad. Okay, let's get a quick fix on your digits right now.”

  He took an inkpad and fingerprint form from the case. The dog watched as he inked my fingers and rolled them on the form. The audiocassette was near my hand and I looked at the concentric white patches on its surface.

  “Keep that pinkie loose,” said Milo. “Feel like a scumbag felon yet?”

  “I don't say squat without my lawyer, pig.”

  He chuckled and handed me a cloth. As I wiped my fingers, he took a small camera out of the case and photographed the prints on the tape. Flipping the cartridge over with the pencil, he dusted, raised more prints on the other side, and took pictures of them, muttering, “Might as well do it right.” Then he lowered the cassette into a small box lined with cotton, sealed the container, and put it into the case.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  He looked at my print form, then at the tape, and shook his head. “They always look the same to me. Let the lab deal with it.”

  “I meant about the tape. Sound like any movie you know?”

  He ran his hand over his face, as if washing without water. “Not really.”

  “Me neither. Didn't the kid's voice have a brainwashed quality to it?”

  “More like brain dead,” he said. “Yeah, it was ugly. But that doesn't make it real. Far as I'm concerned, it's still filed under B for “bad joke.' ”

  “Someone getting a child to chant as a joke?”

  He nodded. “We're living in weird times, Doc.”

  “But what if it is real? What if we're dealing with a sadist who's abducted and tortured a child and is telling me about it in order to heighten the kick?”

  “The screamer was the one who sounded tortured, Alex. And that was an adult. Someone's messing with your head.”

  “If it's not Wallace,” I said, “maybe it's some psychopath picking me as his audience because I treat kids and sometimes my name gets in the papers. Someone who read about Becky's murderer screaming “bad love' and got an idea. And for all I know, I'm not the only therapist he's contacted.”

  “Could be. When was the last time you were in the papers?”

  “This summer—when the Jones case went to trial.”

  “Anything's possible,” he said.

  “Or maybe it's more direct, Milo. A former patient, telling me I failed him. I started going through my files, got halfway and couldn't find anything. But who knows? My patients were all children. In most cases I have no idea what kind of adults they turned into.”

  “If you found anything funny, would you give me the names?”

  “Couldn't,” I said. “Without some kind of clear danger, I couldn't justify breaking confidentiality.”

  He scowled. The dog watched him unwaveringly.

  “What're you staring at?” he demanded.

  Wag, wag.

  Milo began to smile, fought it, picked up his case, and put a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  “Listen, Alex, I still wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Let me take these to the lab right now instead of tomorrow, see if I can get some night-shifter to put some speed on. I'll also make a copy and start a case file—private one, just for my eyes. When in doubt, be a goddamn clerk.”

  After he left, I tried to read a psychology journal but couldn't concentrate. I watched the news, did fifty pushups, and had another go at my charts. I made it through all of them. Kids' names, vaguely remembered pathologies. No allusions to “bad love.” No one I could see wanting to frighten me.

  At ten, Robin called. “Hi, honey.”

  “Hi,” I said. “You sound good.”

  “I am good, but I miss you. Maybe I'll come home early.”

  “That would be great. Just say when and I'll be at the airport.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Peachy. We've got a visitor.”

  I described the bulldog's arrival.

  “Oh,” she said, “he sounds adorable. Now I definitely want to come home early.”

  “He snorts and drools.”

  “How cute. You know, we should get a dog of our own. We're nurturant, right? And you had one when you were a kid. Don't you miss it?”

  “My father had one,” I said. “A hunting cur that didn't like children. It died when I was five and we never got another, but sure, I like dogs—how about something big and protective?”

  “Long as
it's also warm and furry.”

  “What breeds do you like?”

  “I don't know—something solid and dependable. Let me think about it and when I get back we can go shopping.”

  “Sounds good, bowwow.”

  “We can do other stuff, too,” she said.

  “Sounds even better.”

  Just before midnight, I fashioned a bed for the dog out of a couple of towels, placed it on the floor of the service porch, and turned out the light. The dog stared at it, then trotted over to the fridge.

  “No way,” I said. “Time to sleep.”

  He turned his back on me and sat. I left for the bedroom. He heeled along. Feeling like Simon Legree, I closed the door on his supplicating eyes.

  As soon as I got under the covers I heard scratching, then heavy breathing. Then something that sounded like an old man choking.

  I jumped out of bed and opened the door. The dog raced through my feet and hurled himself up on the bed.

  “Forget it,” I said and put him on the carpet.

  He made the choking sound again, stared, and tried to climb up.

  I returned him to the floor.

  A couple more tries and he gave up, turning his back on me and staying hunkered against the dust ruffle.

  It seemed a reasonable compromise.

  But when I awoke in the middle of the night, thinking about pain screams and robot chants, he was right next to me, soft eyes full of pity. I left him there. A moment later, he was snoring and it helped put me back to sleep.

  CHAPTER

  4

  The next morning I woke up tasting the metal and bite of bad dreams. I fed the dog and called the Rodriguez house again. Still no answer, but this time a machine fed me Evelyn's tired voice over a background of Conway Twitty singing “Slow Hand.”

  I asked her to call me. She hadn't by the time I finished showering and shaving. Neither had anyone else.

  Determined to get outdoors, I left the dog with a big biscuit and walked the couple of miles to the university campus. The computers at the biomed library yielded no references to “bad love” in any medical or psychological journals, and I returned home at noon. The dog licked my hand and jumped up and down. I petted him, gave him some cheese, and received a drool-covered hand by way of thanks.

  After boxing my charts, I carried them back to the closet. A single carton had remained on the shelf. Wondering if it contained files I'd missed, I pulled it down.

  No patient records: it was crammed with charts and reprints of technical articles I'd set aside as references. A thick roll of papers bound with a rubber band was wedged between the folders. The word “PROFUNDITIES” was scrawled across it, in my handwriting. I remembered myself younger, angrier, sarcastic.

  Removing the band from the roll, I flattened the sheaf and inhaled a snootful of dust.

  More nostalgia: a collection of articles I'd authored, and programs from scientific meetings at which I'd presented papers.

  I leafed through it absently until a brochure near the bottom caught my eye. Strong black letters on stiff blue paper, a coffee stain on one corner.

  GOOD LOVE/BAD LOVE

  Psychoanalytic Perspectives and

  Strategies in a Changing World

  November 28–29, 1979

  Western Pediatric Medical Center

  Los Angeles, California

  A Conference Examining the Relevance

  and Application of de Boschian Theory

  to Social and Psychobiological Issues

  and Commemorating Fifty Years of

  Teaching, Research, and Clinical Work by

  ANDRES B. DE BOSCH, Ph.D.

  Co-sponsored by WPMC

  and

  The de Bosch Institute and Corrective School,

  Santa Barbara, California

  Conference Co-Chairs

  Katarina V. de Bosch, Ph.D.

  Practicing Psychoanalyst and Acting Director,

  The de Bosch Institute and Corrective School

  Alexander Delaware, Ph.D.

  Assistant Professor of Pediatrics

  and Psychology, WPMC

  Harvey M. Rosenblatt, M.D.

  Practicing Psychoanalyst and Clinical Professor of

  Psychiatry

  New York University School of Medicine

  Headshot photos of all three of us. Katarina de Bosch, thin and brooding; Rosenblatt and I, bearded and professorial.

  The rest was a list of scheduled speakers—more photos—and details of registration.

  “Good Love/Bad Love.” I remembered it clearly now. Wondered how I could have forgotten.

  Nineteen seventy-nine had been my fourth year on staff at Western Peds, a period marked by long days and longer nights on the cancer ward and the genetic disorders unit, holding the hands of dying children and listening to families with unanswerable questions.

  In March of that year, the head of psychiatry and the chief psychologist both chose to go on sabbatical. Though they weren't on speaking terms and the chief never returned, their last official cooperative venture was designating me interim chief.

  Slapping my back and grinding their teeth around their pipe bits, they worked hard at making it sound like a stepping-stone to something wonderful. What it had amounted to was more administrative chores and just enough of a temporary pay raise to kick me into the next tax bracket, but I'd been too young to know any better.

  Back then, Western Peds had been a prestigious place, and I learned quickly that one aspect of my new job was fielding requests from other agencies and institutions wanting to associate with the hospital. Most common were proposals for jointly sponsored conferences, to which the hospital would contribute its good name and its physical premises in return for continuing-education credits for the medical staff and a percentage of the box office. Of the scores of requests received yearly, a good many were psychiatric or psychological in nature. Of those, only two or three were accepted.

  Katarina de Bosch's letter had been one of several I received, just weeks after assuming my new post. I scanned it and rejected it.

  Not a tough decision—the subject matter didn't interest me or my staff: the front-line battles we were waging on the wards placed the theorizations of classical psychoanalysis low on our want list. And from my readings of his work, Andres de Bosch was a middleweight analyst—a prolific but superficial writer who'd produced little in the way of original thought and had parlayed a year in Vienna as one of Freud's students and membership in the French resistance into an international reputation. I wasn't even sure he was still alive; the letter from his daughter didn't make it clear, and the conference she proposed had a memorial flavor to it.

  I wrote her a polite letter.

  Two weeks later I was called in to see the medical director, a pediatric surgeon named Henry Bork who favored Hickey-Freeman suits, Jamaican cigars, and sawtooth abstract art, and who hadn't operated in years.

  “Alex.” He smiled and motioned to a Breuer chair. A slender woman was sitting in a matching nest of leather and chrome on the other side of the room.

  She looked to be slightly older than me—early thirties, I guessed—but her face was one of those long, sallow constructions that would always seem aged. The beginnings of worry lines suggested themselves at crucial junctures, like a portrait artist's initial tracings. Her lips were chapped—all of her looked dry—and her only makeup was a couple of grudging lines of mascara.

  Her eyes were large enough without the shadowing, dark, heavy lidded, slightly bloodshot, close set. Her nose was prominent, down tilted, and sharp, with a small bulb at the tip. Full wide lips were set sternly. Her legs were pressed together at the knees, feet set squarely on the floor.

  She wore a coarse, black, scallop-necked wool sweater over a pleated black skirt, stockings tinted to mimic a Caribbean tan, and black loafers. No jewelry. Her hair was straight, brown, and long, drawn back very tightly from a low, flat brow, and fastened above each ear with wide, black, wooden barrettes.
A houndstooth jacket was draped over her lap. Near one shoe was a black leatherette attaché case.

  As I sat down, she watched me, hands resting upon one another, spindly and white. The top one was sprinkled with some sort of eczematous rash. Her nails were cut short. One cuticle looked raw.

  Bork stepped between us and spread his arms as if preparing to conduct a symphony.

  “Dr. Delaware, Dr. Katarina de Bosch. Dr. de Bosch, Alex Delaware, our acting chief psychologist.”

  I turned to her and smiled. She gave a nod so tiny I might have imagined it.

  Bork backed away, rested a buttock on his desk, and cupped both his hands over one knee. The desk surface was twenty square feet of lacquered walnut shaped like a surfboard, topped with an antique padded leather blotter and a green marble inkwell. Centered on the blotter was a single rectangle of stiff blue paper. He picked it up and used it to rap his knuckles.

  “Do you recall Dr. de Bosch's writing to you suggesting a collaborative venture with your division, Alex?”

  I nodded.

  “And the disposition of that request?”

  “I turned it down.”

  “Might I ask why?”

  “The staff's been asking for things directly related to inpatient management, Henry.”

  Looking pained, Bork shook his head, then handed the blue paper to me.

  A program for the conference, still smelling of printer's ink. Full schedule, speakers, and registration. My name was listed below Katarina de Bosch's as co-chair. My picture below, lifted off the professional staff roster.

  My face broiled. I took a deep breath. “Looks like a fait accompli, Henry.” I tried to hand him the brochure, but he put his hands back on his knees.

  “Keep it for your records, Alex.” Standing, he sidled in front of the desk, taking tiny steps, like a man on a ledge. Finally, he managed to get behind the surfboard and sat down.

  Katarina de Bosch was inspecting her knuckles.

  I considered maintaining my dignity but decided against it. “Nice to know what I'm doing in November, Henry. Care to give me my schedule for the rest of the decade?”

  A small, sniffing sound came from Katarina's chair. Bork smiled at her, then turned to me, shifting his lips into neutral.