Jonathan Kellerman - [Alex Delaware 01]

by When the Bough Breaks (Shrunken Heads) (v5. 0) (epub)

  “What’s that?”

  “Mr. Kruger also listed a B.A. in psychology from Jedson College in Washington State. Would your records contain that kind of information as well?”

  “It would be on his application to graduate school. We should have transcripts, but I don’t see why you need to—”

  “Marianne, I’m going to have to report this to the State Board of Behavioral Science examiners, because state licensure is involved. I want to know all the facts.”

  “I see. Let me check.”

  This time she was back in a moment.

  “I’ve got his transcript from Jedson here, Doctor. He did receive a B.A. but it wasn’t in psychology.”

  “What was it in?”

  She laughed.

  “Dramatic arts. Acting.”

  I called the school where Raquel Ochoa taught and had her pulled out of class. Despite that, she seemed pleased to hear from me.

  “Hi. How’s the investigation going?”

  “We’re getting closer,” I lied. “That’s what I called you about. Did Elena keep a diary or any kind of records around the apartment?”

  “No. Neither of us were diary writers. Never had been.”

  “No notebooks, tapes, anything?”

  “The only tapes I saw were music—she had a tape deck in her new car—and some cassettes Handler gave her to help her relax. For sleep. Why?”

  I ignored the question.

  “Where are her personal effects?”

  “You should know that. The police had them. I suppose they gave them back to her mother. What’s going on? Have you found out something?”

  “Nothing definite. Nothing I can talk about. We’re trying to fit things together.”

  “I don’t care how you do it, just catch him and punish him. The monster.”

  I dredged up a rancid lump of false confidence and smeared it all over my voice. “We will.”

  “I know you will.”

  Her faith made me uneasy.

  “Raquel, I’m away from the files. Do you have her mother’s home address handy?”

  “Sure.” She gave it to me.

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you planning on visiting Elena’s family?”

  “I thought it would be helpful to talk to them in person.”

  There was silence on the other end. Then she spoke.

  “They’re good people. But they may shut you out.”

  “It’s happened before.”

  She laughed.

  “I think you’d do better if I went with you. I’m like a member of the family.”

  “It’s no hassle for you?”

  “No. I want to help. When do you want to go?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Fine. I’ll get off early. Tell them I’m not feeling well. Pick me up at two-thirty. Here’s my address.”

  She lived in a modest West L.A. neighborhood not far from where the Santa Monica and San Diego Freeways merged in blissful union, an area of crackerbox apartment buildings populated by singles who couldn’t afford the Marina.

  She was visible a block away, waiting by the curb, dressed in a pigeon-blood crepe blouse, blue denim skirt and tooled western boots.

  She got in the car, crossed a pair of unstockinged brown legs and smiled.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi. Thanks for doing this.”

  “I told you, this is something I want to do. I want to feel useful.”

  I drove north, toward Sunset. There was jazz on the radio, something free form and atonal, with saxophone solos that sounded like police sirens and drums like a heart in arrest.

  “Change it, if you’d like.”

  She pushed some buttons, fiddled with the dial, and found a mellow rock station. Someone was singing about lost love and old movies and tying it all together.

  “What do you want to know from them?” she asked, settling back.

  “If Elena told them anything about her work—specifically the child who died. Anything about Handler.”

  There were lots of questions in her eyes but she kept them there.

  “Talking about Handler will be especially touchy. The family didn’t like the idea of her going out with a man who was so much older. And” she hesitated, “an Anglo, to boot. In situations like that the tendency is to deny the whole thing, not even to acknowledge it. It’s cultural.”

  “To some extent it’s human.”

  “To some extent, maybe. We Hispanics do it more. Part of it is Catholicism. The rest is our Indian blood. How can you survive in some of the desolate regions we’ve lived in without denying reality? You smile, and pretend it’s lush and fertile and there’s plenty of water and food, and the desert doesn’t seem so bad.”

  “Any suggestions how I might get around the denial?”

  “I don’t know.” She sat with her hands folded in her lap, a proper schoolgirl. “I think I’d better start the talking. Cruz—Elena’s mom—always liked me. Maybe I can get through. But don’t expect miracles.”

  She had little to worry about on that account.

  Echo Park is a chunk of Latin America transported to the dusty, hilly streets that, buttressed by crumbling concrete embankments on either side of Sunset Boulevard, rise between Hollywood and downtown. The streets have names like Macbeth and Macduff, Bonnybrae and Laguna, but are anything but poetic. They climb to the south and dip down into the Union District ghetto. To the north they climb, feeding into the tiny lake-centered park that gives the area its name, continue through arid trails, get lost in an incongruous wilderness that looks down upon Dodger Stadium, and Elysian Park, home of the Los Angeles Police Academy.

  Sunset changes when it leaves Hollywood and enters Echo Park. The porno theaters and by-the-hour motels yield to botánicas and bodegas, outlets for Discos Latinos, an infinite array of food stands—taco joints, Peruvian seafood parlors, fast-food franchises—and firstrate Latino restaurants, beauty shops with windows guarded by styro-foam skulls wearing blond Dynel wigs, Cuban bakeries, storefront medical and legal clinics, bars and social clubs. Like many poor areas, the Echo Park part of Sunset is continually clogged with foot traffic.

  The Seville cut a slow swath through the afternoon mob. There was a mood on the boulevard as urgent and sizzling as the molten lard spitting forth from the fryers of the food stands. There were homeboys sporting homemade tattoos, fifteen-year-old mothers wheeling fat babies in rickety strollers that threatened to fall apart at every curb, rummies, pushers, starched-collared immigration lawyers, cleaning women on shore leave, grandmothers, flower vendors, a never-ending stream of brown-eyed children.

  “It’s very weird,” said Raquel, “coming back here. In a fancy car.”

  “How long have you been gone?”

  “A thousand years.”

  She didn’t seem to want to say more so I dropped it. At Fairbanks Place she told me to turn left. The Gutierrez home was at the end of an alley-sized twister that peaked, then turned into a dirt road just above the foothills. A quarter mile further and we’d have been the only humans in the world.

  I’d noticed that she had a habit of biting herself—lips, fingers, knuckles—when she was nervous. And she was gnawing at her thumb right now. I wondered what kind of hunger it satisfied.

  I drove cautiously—there was scarcely room for a single vehicle—passing young men in T-shirts working on old cars with the dedication of priests before a shrine, children sucking candy-coated fingers. Long ago, the street had been planted with elms that had grown huge. Their roots buckled the sidewalk and weeds grew in the cracks. Branches scraped the roof of the car. An old woman with inflamed legs wrapped in rags pushed a shopping cart full of memories up an incline worthy of San Francisco. Graffiti scarred every free inch of space, proclaiming the immortality of Little Willie Chacon, the Echo Parque Skulls, Los Conquistadores, the Lemoyne Boys and the tongue of Maria Paula Bonilla.

  “There.” She pointed to a cottagelike frame house painted light green and roofed with b
rown tarpaper. The front yard was dry and brown but rimmed with hopeful beds of red geraniums and clusters of orange and yellow poppies that looked like all-day suckers. There was rock trim at the base of the house and a portico over the entry that shadowed a sagging wooden porch upon which a man sat.

  “That’s Rafael, the older brother. On the porch.”

  I found a parking space next to a Chevy on blocks. I turned the wheels to the curb and locked them in place. We got out of the car, dust spiraling at our heels.

  “Rafael!” she called and waved. The man on the porch took a moment to lift his gaze, then he raised his hand—feebly, it seemed.

  “I used to live right around the corner,” she said, making it sound like a confession. She led me up a dozen steps and through an open iron gate.

  The man on the porch hadn’t risen. He stared at us with apprehension and curiosity and something else that I couldn’t identify. He was pale and thin to the point of being gaunt, with the same curious mixture of Hispanic features and fair coloring as his dead sister. His lips were bloodless, his eyes heavily lidded. He looked like the victim of some systemic disease. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt with the sleeves rolled up just below the elbows. It bloused out around his waist, several sizes too large. His trousers were black and looked as if they’d once belonged to a fat man’s suit. His shoes were bubble-toed oxfords, cracked at the tips, worn unlaced with the tongues protruding and revealing thick white socks. His hair was short and combed straight back.

  He was in his mid-twenties but he had an old man’s face, a weary, wary mask.

  Raquel went to him and kissed him lightly on the top of his head. He looked up at her but was unmoved.

  “H’lo, Rocky.”

  “Rafael, how are you?”

  “O.K.” He nodded his head and it looked for a moment as if it would roll off his neck. He let his eyes settle on me; he was having trouble focusing.

  Raquel bit her lip.

  “We came by to see you and Andy and your mom. This is Alex Delaware. He works with the police. He’s involved in investigating Elena’s—case.”

  His face registered alarm, his hands tightened around the arm of the chair. Then, as if responding to a stage direction to relax, he grinned at me, slumped lower, winked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I held out my hand. He looked at it, puzzled, recognized it as a long-lost friend, and extended his own thin claw.

  His arm was pitifully undernourished, a bundle of sticks held together by a sallow paper wrapper. As our fingers touched his sleeve rode up and I saw the track marks. There were lots of them. Most looked old—lumpy charcoal smudges—but a few were freshly pink. One, in particular, was no antique, sporting a pinpoint of blood at its center.

  His handshake was moist and tenous. I let go and the arm fell limply to his side.

  “Hey, man,” he said, barely audible. “Good to meetja.” He turned away, lost in his own timeless dream-hell. For the first time I heard the oldies music coming from a cheap transistor radio on the floor beside his chair. The puny plastic box crackled with static. The sound reproduction was atrocious, the music had the chalky quality of notes filtered through a mile of mud. Rafael had his head thrown back, enraptured. To him it was the Celestial Choir transmitting directly to his temporal lobes.

  “Rafael,” she smiled.

  He looked at her, smiled, nodded off and was gone.

  She stared at him, tears in her eyes. I moved toward her and she turned away in shame and rage.

  “Goddammit.”

  “How long has he been shooting up?”

  “Years. But I thought he’d quit. The last I’d heard he’d quit.” She raised her hand to her mouth, swayed, as if ready to fall. I got in position to catch her but she righted herself. “He got hooked in Viet Nam. Came home with a heavy habit. Elena spent lots of time and money trying to help him get off. A dozen times he tried, and each time he slipped back. But he’d been off it for over a year. Elena was so happy about it. He got a job as a boxboy at the Lucky’s on Alvarado.”

  She faced me, nostrils flaring, eyes floating like black lilies in a salty pond, lips quivering like harp-strings.

  “Everything is falling apart.”

  She grasped the newel post on the porch rail for support. I came behind her.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He was always the sensitive one. Quiet, never dating, no friends. He got beat up a lot. When their dad died he tried to take over, to be the man of the house. Tradition says the oldest son should do that. But it didn’t work. Nobody took him seriously. They laughed. We all did. So he gave up, as if he’d failed some final test. He dropped out of school, stayed home and read comic books and watched TV all day—just stared at the screen. When the army said they wanted him he seemed glad. Cruz cried to see him go, but he was happy …”

  I looked at him, sitting so low he was almost parallel with the ground. Swallowed up by junkie-slumber. His mouth was open and he snored loudly. The radio played “Daddy’s Home.”

  Raquel hazarded another look at him, then whipped her head away, disgusted. She wore an expression of noble suffering, an Aztec virgin steeling herself for the ultimate sacrifice.

  I put my hands on her shoulders and she leaned back in my arms. She stayed there, tense and unyielding, allowing herself a miser’s ration of tears.

  “This is a hell of a start,” she said. Inhaling deeply, she let out her breath in a breeze of wintergreen. She wiped her eyes and turned around. “You must think all I do is weep. Come on, let’s go inside.”

  She pulled the screen door open and it slapped sharply against the wood siding of the house.

  We stepped into a small front room furnished with old but cared-for relics. It was warm and dark, the windows shut tight and masked by yellowing parchment shades—a room unaccustomed to visitors. Faded lace curtains were tied back from the window frames and matching lace coverlets shielded the arms of the chairs—a sofa and loveseat set upholstered in dark green crushed velvet, the worn spots shiny and the color of jungle parrots, two wicker rockers. A painting of the two dead Kennedy brothers in black velvet hung over the mantel. Carvings in wood and Mexican onyx sat atop lace-covered end tables. There were two floor lamps with beaded shades, a plaster Jesus in agony hanging on the whitewashed wall next to a still life of a straw basket of oranges. Family portraits in ornate frames covered another wall and there was a large graduation picture of Elena suspended high above those. A spider crawled in the space where wall met ceiling.

  A door to the right revealed a sliver of white tile. Raquel walked to the sliver and peeked in.

  “Señora Cruz?”

  The doorway widened and a small, heavy woman appeared, dish-towel in hand. She wore a blue print dress, unbelted, and her gray-black hair was tied back in a bun, held in place by a mock tortoiseshell comb. Silver earrings dangled from her ears and salmon spots of rouge punctuated her cheekbones. Her skin had the delicate, baby-soft look common in old women who had once been beautiful.

  “Raquelita!”

  She put her towel down, came out, and the two women embraced for a long moment.

  When she saw me over Raquel’s shoulder, she smiled. But her face closed up as tight as a pawnbroker’s safe. She pulled away and gave a small bow.

  “Señor,” she said, with too much deference, and looked at Raquel, arching one eyebrow.

  “Señora Gutierrez.”

  Raquel spoke to her in rapid Spanish. I caught the words “Elena,” “policía,” and “doctor.” She ended it with a question.

  The older woman listened politely, then shook her head.

  “No.” Some things are the same in any language.

  Raquel turned to me. “She says she knows nothing more than what she told the police the first time.”

  “Can you ask her about the Nemeth boy? They didn’t ask her about that.”

  She turned to speak, then stopped.

  “Why don’t we take it slowly? It would help if w
e ate. Let her be a hostess, let her give to us.”

  I was genuinely hungry and told her so. She relayed the message to Mrs. Gutierrez, who nodded and returned to her kitchen.

  “Let’s sit down,” Raquel said.

  I took the loveseat. She tucked herself into a corner of the sofa.

  The señora came back with cookies and fruit and hot coffee. She asked Raquel something.

  “She’d like to know if this is substantial enough or would you like some homemade chorizo?”

  “Please tell her this is wonderful. However if you think my accepting chorizo would help things along, I’ll oblige.”

  Raquel spoke again. A few moments later I was facing a platter of the spicy sausage, rice, refried beans and salad with lemon-oil dressing.

  “Muchas gracias, señora.” I dug in.

  I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying, but it sounded and looked like small talk. The two women touched each other a lot, patting hands, stroking cheeks. They smiled, and seemed to forget my presence.

  Then suddenly the wind shifted and the laughter turned to tears. Mrs. Gutierrez ran out of the room, seeking the refuge of her kitchen.

  Raquel shook her head.

  “We were talking about the old times, when Elena and I were little girls. How we used to play secretary in the bushes, pretend we had typewriters and desks out there. It became difficult for her.”

  I pushed my plate aside.

  “Do you think we should go?” I asked.

  “Let’s wait a while.” She poured me more coffee and filled a cup for herself. “It would be more respectful.”

  Through the screen door I could see the top of Rafael’s fair head above the rim of the chair. His arm had fallen, so that the fingernails scraped the ground. He was beyond pleasure or pain.

  “Did she talk about him?” I asked.

  “No. As I told you, it’s easier to deny.”

  “But how can he sit there, shooting up, right in front of her, with no pretense?”

  “She used to cry a lot about it. After a while you accept the fact that things aren’t going to turn out the way you want them to. She’s had plenty of training in it, believe me. If you asked her about him she’d say he was sick. Just as if he had a cold, or the measles. It’s just a matter of finding the right cure. Have you heard of the curanderos?”