Jonathan Kellerman - [Alex Delaware 01]

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

  She sounded bitter, a wallflower describing last year’s prom.

  “The average household income of the families that send their kids here is over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Think of that, Alex. Everyone is rich. Did you see the harbor?”

  I nodded.

  “Those floating toys belong to students.” She paused, as if she still couldn’t believe it. “The parking lot looks like the Monte Carlo Grand Prix. These kids wear cashmere and suede for horsing around.”

  One of her raw, coarse hands found the other and caressed it. She looked from wall to wall of the tiny room as if searching for hidden listening devices. I wondered what she was so nervous about. So Jedson was a school for rich kids. Stanford had started out that way too and might have ended up similarly stagnant if someone hadn’t figured out that not letting in smart Jews and Asians and other people with funny names and high IQ’s would lead to eventual academic entropy.

  “There’s no crime in being rich,” I said.

  “It’s not just that. It’s the utter mindlessness that goes along with it. I was at Madison during the sixties. There was a sense of social awareness. Activism. We were working to end the war. Now it’s the anti-nukes movement. The university can be a greenhouse for the conscience. Here, nothing grows.”

  I envisioned her fifteen years back, dressed in khakis and sweatshirt, marching and mouthing slogans. Radicalism had fought a losing battle with survival, eroded by too much of nothing. But she could still take an occasional hit of nostalgia …

  “It’s especially hard on the faculty,” she was saying. “Not the Old Guard. The Young Turks—they actually call themselves that. They come here because of the job crunch, with their typical academic idealism and liberal views and last two, maybe three years. It’s intellectually stultifying—not to mention the frustration of earning fifteen thousand dollars a year when the student’s wardrobes cost more than that.”

  “You sound as if you have first-hand knowledge.”

  “I do. There was—a man. A good friend of mine. He came here to teach philosophy. He was brilliant, a Princeton graduate, a genuine scholar. It ate him up. He talked to me about it, told me what it was like to stand up in front of a class and lecture on Kierkegaard and Sartre and see thirty pairs of vacant blue eyes staring back. Ubermensch U. he called it. He left last year.”

  She looked pained. I changed the subject.

  “You mentioned the Old Guard. Who are they?”

  “Jedson graduates who actually develop an interest in something other than making money. They go on to earn advanced degrees in humanities—something totally useless like history or sociology or literature—and then come crawling back here to teach. Jedson takes care of its own.”

  “I’d imagine they find it easier to relate to the students, coming from the same background.”

  “They must. They stay on. Most of them are older—there haven’t been too many returning scholars lately. The Old Guard may be shrinking. Some are quite decent, really. I get the feeling they were always outcasts—the misfits. Even the privileged castes have those, I suppose.”

  The look on her face bespoke firsthand experience with the pain of social rejection. She may have sensed she was in danger of crossing the boundary from social commentary to psychological striptease, for she drew back, put on her glasses and smiled sourly.

  “How’s that for public relations?”

  “For someone new you’re certainly got a handle on the place.”

  “Some of it I’ve seen for myself. Some I learned.”

  “From your friend the scholar?”

  “Yes.” She stopped and picked up an oversized imitation leather handbag. It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for.

  “This is Lee,” she said, and handed me a snapshot of herself and a man several inches shorter than she. The man was balding, with tufts of thick, dark, curling hair over each ear, a bushy dark mustache and rimless round spectacles. He wore a faded blue work shirt and jeans and high-laced hiking boots. Margaret Dopplemeier was dressed in a serape that accentuated her size, baggy cords and flat sandals. She had her arm around him, and looked maternal and childishly dependent at the same time. “He’s in New Mexico now, working on his book. In solitude, he says.”

  I gave her back the photo.

  “Writers often need that.”

  “Yes. We’ve gone round and round about that.” She put her keepsake back, made a move toward the cheese and then retracted her hand, as if she’d suddenly lost her appetite.

  I let a silent moment pass, then performed a lateral arabesque away from her personal life.

  “What you’re saying is fascinating, Margaret. Jedson is set up with all the enrollment it needs—it’s a self-perpetuating system.”

  The word “system” can be a psychological catalyst for anyone who’s flirted with the Left. It got her going again.

  “Absolutely. The percentage of students whose parents are also Jedson graduates is unbelievably high. I’ll bet that the two thousand students come from no more than five to seven hundred families. The same surnames keep cropping up when I compile lists. That’s why when you called it a family before I was taken aback. I wondered how much you knew.”

  “Nothing until I came here.”

  “Yes. I’ve said too much, haven’t I?”

  “In a closed system,” I persisted, “publicity is the last thing the establishment wants.”

  “Of course. Jedson is an anachronism. It survives the twentieth century by staying small and keeping out of the headlines. My instructions were to wine you, dine you, see that you took a nice little stroll around the campus, then escort you off the grounds with little or nothing to write about. The Trustees of Jedson don’t want exposure in the Los Angeles Times. They don’t want issues like affirmative action or equal opportunity enrollment to rear their ugly heads.”

  “I appreciate your honesty, Margaret.”

  For a moment I thought she was going to cry.

  “Don’t make it sound as if I’m some kind of saint. I’m not and I know it. My talking to you was spineless. Deceitful. The people here aren’t evil, I have no right to expose them. They’ve been good to me. But I get so weary of putting up a front, of attending quaint little teas with women who can talk all day about china patterns and place settings—they give a class here in place settings, do you believe that?”

  She looked at her hands as if unable to envision them holding anything as delicate as china.

  “My job is pretense, Alex. I’m a glorified mailing service. But I’ll not leave,” she insisted, debating an unseen adversary. “Not yet. Not at this point in my life. I wake up and see the lake. I have my books and a good stereo. I can pick fresh blackberries not far from here. I eat them in the morning with cream.”

  I said nothing.

  “Will you betray me?” she asked.

  “Of course not, Margaret.”

  “Then go. Forget about including Jedson in your story. There’s nothing here for an outsider.”

  “I can’t.”

  She sat straight in her chair.

  “Why not?” There was terror and anger in her voice, something decidedly menacing in her eyes. I could understand her lover’s flight to solitude. I was certain the mental deadness of Jedson’s student body wasn’t the only thing he’d been escaping.

  I had nothing to offer her that would keep our lines of communication open, other than the truth and the chance to be a coconspirator. I took a deep breath and told her the real reason for my visit.

  When I was through she wore the same possessive-dependent look I’d seen in her photograph. I wanted to back away, but my chair was inches from the door.

  “It’s funny,” she said, “I should feel exploited, used. But I don’t. You have an honest face. Even your lies sound righteous.”

  “I’m no more righteous than you are. I simply want to get some facts. Help me.”

  “I was a member of SDS, you know. The police were pigs
to me in those days.”

  “These aren’t those days, I’m not a policeman, and we’re not talking about abstract theory and the polemics of revolution. This is triple murder, Margaret, child abuse, maybe more. Not political assassinations. Innocent people hacked into bloody gobbets, mashed into human garbage. Children run down on lonely canyon roads.”

  She shuddered, turned away, ran an unpolished fingernail along the top of a tooth, then faced me again.

  “And you think one of them—a Jedsonite—was responsible for all of that?” The very idea was delicious to her.

  “I think two of them had some involvement in it.”

  “Why are you doing this? You say you’re a psychiatrist.”

  “Psychologist.”

  “Whatever. What’s in it for you?”

  “Nothing. Nothing you’d believe.”

  “Try me.”

  “I want to see justice done. It’s been eating at me.”

  “I believe you,” she said softly.

  She was gone for twenty minutes and when she returned it was with an armful of oversized volumes bound in dark blue Morocco leather.

  “These are the yearbooks, if your estimates of their ages are correct. I’m going to leave you with them and search for the alumni files. Lock yourself in when I’m gone and don’t answer the door. I’ll knock three times, then twice. That will be our signal.”

  “Roger.”

  “Ha.” She laughed, and for the first time looked almost attractive.

  Timothy Kruger had lied about being a poor boy at Jedson. His family had donated a couple of buildings and even a casual reading of the book made it obvious the Krugers were Very Important. The part about his athletic prowess, though, was true. He’d lettered in track, baseball and Greco-Roman wrestling. In his yearbook pictures he resembled the man I’d spoken to days before. There were shots of him jumping hurdles, throwing the javelin, and later on, in a section on drama, in the roles of Hamlet and Petruchio. The impression I got was that of a big man on campus. I wondered how he’d ended up at La Casa de los Niños operating under a phony credential.

  L. Willard Towle’s photo showed him to have been a Tab Hunter-type blond in his youth. Notations under his name mentioned presidency of the Pre-Med Club and the Biology Honor Society, as well as captain of the crew team. There was also an asterisk that led to a footnote advising the reader to turn to the last page of the book. I obeyed the instructions and came to a black-bordered photograph—the same picture I’d seen in Towle’s office, of his wife and son against a backdrop of lake and mountains. There was an inscription beneath the photo:

  In Memoriam

  Lilah Hutchison Towle

  1930-1951

  Lionel Willard Towle, Jr.

  1949-1951

  Under the inscription were four lines of verse.

  How swiftly doth the night move

  To dash our hopes and dim our dreams;

  But even in the darkest night

  The ray of peace yet beams.

  It was signed “S.”

  I was rereading the poem when Margaret Dopplemeier’s coded knock sounded on the door. I slid open the latch and she came in holding a manila envelope. She locked the door, went behind her desk, opened the packet and shook out two three-by-five index cards.

  “These are straight out of the sacred alumni file.” She glanced at one and handed it to me. “Here’s your doctor.”

  Towle’s name was at the top, written out in elegant script. There were several entries under it, in different hands and different colors of ink. Most of them took the form of abbreviations and numeric codes.

  “Can you explain it to me?”

  She came around and sat down next to me, took the card and studied it.

  “There’s nothing mysterious about any of it. The abbreviations are meant to save space. The five digits after the name are the alumnus code, for mailing, filing, that kind of thing. After that you’ve got the number 3, which means he’s the third member of his family to attend Jedson. The med is self-explanatory—it’s an occupation code, and the F:med means medicine is also the family’s primary business. If it were shipping, it would say shp, banking, bnk, and so on. B:51 is the year he received his bachelor’s degree. M: J,148793 indicates that he married another Jedson student and her alumnus code is cross-referenced. Here’s something interesting—there’s a small d in parentheses after the wife’s code, which means she’s deceased, and the date of death is 6/17/51—she died when he was still a student here. Did you know that?”

  “I did. Would there be any way of finding out more about that?”

  She thought for a moment.

  “We could check the local papers for that week, for an obituary or funeral notice.”

  “What about the student paper?”

  “The Spartan is a rag,” she said scornfully, “but I suppose it would cover something like that. Back issues are stored in the library, on the other side of campus. We can go there later. Do you think it’s relevant?”

  She was flushed, girlish, given over totally to our little intrigue.

  “It just could be, Margaret. I want to know everything I can about these people.”

  “Van der Graaf,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Professor Van der Graaf, from the history department. He’s the oldest of the Old Guard, been around Jedson longer than anyone I know of. On top of that he’s a great gossip. I sat next to him at a garden party and the sweet old thing told me all sorts of tidbits—who was sleeping with whom, faculty dirt and the like.”

  “They let him get away with it?”

  “He’s close to ninety, rolling in family money, unmarried with no heirs. They’re just waiting for him to croak and leave it all to their college. He’s been emeritus from way back. Keeps an office on campus, sequesters himself there pretending to write books. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sleeps there. He knows more about Jedson than anybody.”

  “Do you think he’d talk to me?”

  “If he was in the right mood. In fact I thought of him when you told me over the phone that you wanted to find out about illustrious alumni. But I figured it was too risky leaving him alone with a reporter. You never know what he’s going to do or say.”

  She giggled, enjoying the old man’s ability to rebel from a position of power.

  “Of course now that I know what you want,” she continued, “he’d be perfect. You’d need some kind of story about why you wanted to talk about Towle, but I don’t imagine that would be very difficult for someone as artful as you.”

  “How about this: I’m a reporter for Medical World News. Call me Bill Roberts. Dr. Towle’s been elected President of the Academy of Pediatrics and I’m doing a background story on him.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll call him now.”

  She reached for the phone and I took another look at Towle’s alumnus card. The only information she hadn’t covered was a column of dated entries under the heading $—donations to Jedson, I assumed. They averaged ten thousand dollars a year. Towle was a faithful son.

  “Professor Van der Graaf,” she was saying, “this is Margaret Dopplemeier from Public Relations. I’ve been fine, thank you, and yourself? Very good—oh, I’m sure we can work that out, Professor.” She covered the receiver with her hand and winked at me, mouthing the words ‘good mood.’ “I didn’t know you liked pizza, Professor. No. No, I don’t like anchovies either. Yes, I do like Duesenbergs. I know you do …Yes, I know. The rain was coming down in sheets, Professor. Yes, I would. Yes, when the weather clears up. With the top down. I’ll bring the pizza.”

  She flirted with Van der Graaf for five more minutes and finally broached the subject of my visit. She listened, gave me the okay sign with thumb and forefinger and went back to flirting. I picked up Kruger’s card.

  He was the fifth member of his family to attend Jedson and his degree was listed as having been granted five years previously. There was no mention of current position—the fami
ly was recorded as being active in stl, shp, and rl-est. No mention of matrimony was present, nor had he donated money to the school. There was however an interesting cross-reference. Under REL-F: it said Towle. Finally, the three letters DLT were written in large, block characters at the bottom of the card.

  Margaret got off the phone.

  “He’ll see you. As long as I come along, and quote: Give me a brisk massage, young lady. You’ll be prolonging the years of a living fossil, unquote. The old lecher,” she added affectionately.

  I asked her about Towle’s name on Kruger’s card.

  “REL-F—related family. Apparently your two subjects are cousins of some sort.”

  “Why isn’t that listed on Towle’s card as well?”

  “The heading was probably added after he graduated. Rather than go back and mark each card they simply used it on the new ones. DLT, though, is more interesting. He’s been deleted from the file.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t say. It never would. Some transgression. With his family background it had to be something big. Something that made the school want to wash its hands of him.” She looked up at me. “This is getting interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Very.”

  She put the cards back in the envelope and locked it in her desk.

  “I’ll take you to Van der Graaf now.”

  22

  A GILDED CAGE of an elevator took us to the fifth floor of a domed building on the west side of the campus. It relaxed its jaws and let us out into a silent rotunda, wainscoted in marble and veneered with dust. The ceiling was concave plaster upon which a now-faded mural of cherubs blowing bugles had been painted: we were inside the shell of the dome. The walls were stone and gave off an odor of rotting paper. A stationary diamond-paned window separated two oak doors. One was labeled MAP ROOM and looked as if it hadn’t been opened in generations. The other was blank.