When the Bough Breaks

by Jonathan Kellerman

  It was then that I saw them clearly, flash frozen in the lemon light.

  The small figure was Rodney and he'd appeared suspended because he was being carried in the firm grip of Halstead, the coach, and Tim Kruger. They grasped him under the arms so that his feet dangled inches from the ground.

  They were strong men but the boy was giving them a struggle. He squirmed and kicked like a ferret in a trap, opened his mouth and let out a wordless moan. Halstead clamped a hairy hand over the mouth but the child managed to wrench free and scream again. Halstead stifled him once more and it went on that way as they retreated out of the light and my line of vision, the alternating sounds of cries and muted grunts a crazy trumpet solo that grew faint then faded away.

  Then it was silent and I was alone, back to the wall, bathed in sweat, clothes clammy and sticking to me. I wanted to perform some heroic act, to break out of the deadening inertia that had settled around my ankles like quick-drying cement.

  But I couldn't save anybody. I was a man out of his element. If I followed them there'd be rational explanations for everything and a herd of guards to quickly turn me out, taking careful note of my face so that the gates of La Casa would never again open before it.

  I couldn't afford that, just yet.

  So I stood, up against the wall, rooted in the ghost-town stillness, feeling sick and helpless. I clenched my fists until they hurt and listened to the dry urgent sound of my own breathing like the scraping of boots against alley stones.

  I forced the image of the struggling boy out of my mind.

  When I was sure it was safe I sneaked back to my car.

  17

  The first time I called, at 8 a.m." nobody answered. A half-hour later the University of Oregon was open for business.

  "Good morning, Education."

  "Good morning. This is Dr. Gene Adler calling from Los Angeles. I'm with the Department of Psychiatry at Western Pediatric Medical Center in Los Angeles. We're currently recruiting for a counseling position. One of our applicants has listed on his resume the fact that he received a master's degree in counseling education from your department. As part of our routine credentials check I was wondering if you could verify that for me."

  "I'll switch you to Marianne, in transcripts."

  Marianne had a warm, friendly voice but when I repeated my story for her she told me, firmly, that a written request would be necessary.

  "That's fine with me," I said, "but that will take time. The job for which this individual has applied is being competitively sought by many people. We were planning to make a decision within twenty-four hours. It's just a formality--verification of records--but our liability insurance stipulates that we have to do it. If you'd like I can have the applicant call you to release the information. It's in his best interests."

  "Well... I suppose it'll be all right. All you want to know is if this person received a degree, right? Nothing more personal than that?"

  "That's correct."

  "Who's the applicant?"

  "A gentleman named Timothy Kruger. His records list an MA. four years ago."

  "One moment."

  She was gone for ten minutes, and when she returned to the phone she sounded upset.

  "Well, Doctor, your formality has turned out to be of some value. There is no record of a degree being granted to a person of that name in the last ten years. We do have record of a Timothy Jay Kruger attending one semester of graduate school four years ago, but his major wasn't in counseling, it was in secondary teaching, and he left after that single semester."

  "I see. That's quite disturbing. Any indication of why he left?"

  "None. Does that really matter now?"

  "No, I suppose not--you're absolutely certain about this? I wouldn't want to jeopardize Mr. Kruger's career--"

  "There's no doubt whatsoever." She sounded offended. "I checked and double-checked, Doctor, and then I asked the head of the department, Dr. Gowdy, and he was positive no Timothy Kruger graduated from here."

  "Well, that settles it, doesn't it? And it certainly casts a new light on Mr. Kruger. Could you check one more thing?"

  "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 cracker box 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 un stockinged 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 que
stions 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 botdnicas and bode gas outlets for Discos Latinos, an infinite array of food stands--taco joints, Peruvian seafood parlors, fast-food franchises-and first-rate Latino restaurants, beauty shops with windows guarded by Styrofoam 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 home boys 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 cottage like frame house painted light green and roofed with brown 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 tenuous. 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 box boy 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 apar
t."

  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..."